Cryptome, the secret-document-spilling site, is back online Thursday, after Microsoft withdrew a copyright complaint that shuttered the site the day before.

Microsoft's efforts to suppress a document about how to subpoena online user data backfired, leading instead to widespread attention to (and republication of) the document it tried to suppress.

Microsoft did not apologize in its Thursday statement, and defended its use of copyright law to keep its law enforcement manual private.

Like all service providers, Microsoft must respond to lawful requests from law enforcement agencies to provide information related to criminal investigations. We take our responsibility to protect our customers privacy very seriously, so have specific guidelines that we use when responding to law enforcement requests. In this case, we did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed. We are requesting to have the site restored and are no longer seeking the document’s removal.

Cryptome's proprietor John Young published the 22-page document earlier this week. leading Microsoft to take legal action Tuesday. The document, which contains no trade secrets, advises law enforcement how to file subpoenas (.pdf), outlines what data Microsoft keeps on users of its online services such as Xbox Live and Hotmail, and explains how to parse the resulting user data.

Cryptome's hosting provider, Network Solutions, chose to shutter the entire site and lock down the domain name, even before the Thursday deadline for Young to remove the document. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a U.S.-based host is immune to liability if it makes sure the allegedly offending content is taken down during the time that a counter-claim is being considered in court.

Similar manuals from other large service providers such as Yahoo and Facebook have also been leaked and published online recently. Yahoo also tried unsuccessfully to use the DMCA to suppress its document. However, there is a clear news value to publishing such documents, even if they're copyrighted.

Microsoft took nearly 24 hours to respond to an inquiry for comment, losing the opportunity to quickly leapfrog to the forefront of transparency by understanding that such documents need not – and should not – be hidden from users (with the possible exception of the law enforcement hotline number).

Cox Communications, which runs the nation's third largest ISP, has long made its law enforcement subpoena page – including prices – public.

But Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo do not follow that example, even though all of them want their users to trust them with their most sensitive data and communications. Nor do any of them publish the most basic statistics on how often law enforcement comes knocking with subpoenas and warrants.

In fact, the simplest lesson here is that none of the pixels published over this incident would have been necessary if Microsoft had just published this document in the first place, which few people would have ever bothered to go read. Instead, these companies prefer to worry about the sensitivities of corporate-ass-covering lawyers and law enforcement agencies instead of putting their users and transparency first.

Photo: Emma Swann, Front page photo: Robert Scoble

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