The Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing for Once

By Dina Bass, Bloomberg News

Microsoft Corp. responded swiftly to a pre-dawn fax from the FBI in January. The two terrorists who killed a dozen people at the newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris had Microsoft e-mail accounts stored on servers in the U.S., and 45 minutes later their contents were en route to the agency, to be shared with French authorities.

The company hasn’t always been so eager to comply. A year earlier, it rebuffed a request from the Department of Justice for a suspected drug trafficker’s e-mails. Those were in a data center in Dublin -- and according to ...