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The nation’s first such crisis occurred a little more than a decade after the Constitution was signed. It was 1798 when a “quasi war” broke out between the United States and France on the Caribbean Sea. The French, wanting to pressure the United States to repay loans made by its overthrown monarch, seized more than three hundred American merchant ships and demanded ransom. Some angry Americans called for outright war. Others, such as President John Adams, thought the new nation was no match for the French. Fearing that public debate would fatally undermine the fledgling government, Adams sought to quell the discord by signing a set of four laws that became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These acts allowed the government to imprison and deport “dangerous” foreigners and made it a crime to criticize the government.

Some sixty years later, during the Civil War, the United States would again set aside a key tenet of our democracy when President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus several times to suppress Confederate rebellions. To enforce the army’s draft, Lincoln broadened the suspension and denied the right to trial nationwide. All in all, as many as fifteen thousand Americans were held in prison during the war without appearing before a judge.

In 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, swayed by the military and by public opinion, signed an executive order forcing 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent into remote camps, caged in by barbed wire and armed guards. Two-thirds of those imprisoned had been born in the United States. When the order was rescinded three years later, most had lost their homes, farms, businesses, and communities.

While the country accepted those injustices in moments of national crisis, Americans later questioned the price they had paid for public safety. In my mind, one question was “How will we be judged ten years from now, when the moment passes? Will we be able to say that we honoured our commitment to our customers?”

Once the question was apparent, the answer was clear. We can’t turn over customers’ data voluntarily without valid legal process. And as the company’s most senior lawyer, I have to take responsibility—and bear any criticism—for this position. After all, who better than the lawyers to defend the rights of the customers we serve?

Against this backdrop, virtually every leading tech company found itself on the defensive in the summer of 2013. We conveyed our frustration to officials in Washington, DC. It was a watershed moment. It surfaced contrasts that have contributed to a chasm between governments and the tech sector to this day. Governments serve constituents who live in a defined geography, such as a state or nation. But tech has gone global, and we have customers virtually everywhere.

The cloud has not only changed where and to whom we provide our services, it has redefined our relationship with customers. It has turned tech companies into institutions that in some ways resemble banks. People deposit their money in banks, and they store their most personal information—emails, photos, documents, and text messages—with tech companies.

This new relationship also has implications beyond the tech sector itself. Just as public officials concluded in the 1930s that banks had become too important to the economy to be left unregulated, tech companies have become too important to be left to a laissez-faire policy approach today. They need to be subject to the rule of law and more active regulation. But unlike the banks of the 1930s, tech companies today operate globally, making the whole question of regulation more complicated.

Excerpted from pages 9 to 11 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne