Microsoft Corporation has sued the US government for the right to tell its customers when a government agency is asking for access to the details of their email contents.

The lawsuit is the newest front in the battle between technology firms and the US government over the issue of how much private business establishments are obligated to support government-led scrutiny and surveillance.

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By filing the suit, Microsoft is taking a lead role in this battle, which has been dominated by Apple in recent months due to the government's attempt to get the company to develop software to unlock an iPhone used by one of the terrorist in the massacre in San Bernardino, California.

The suit comes just weeks after the Justice Department dropped its effort to compel Apple to write a software to help it unlock the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife launched an attack in San Bernardino that left 14 dead and many others injured on December 2, 2015.

The US investigating agency FBI could not unlock the encoded phone and won an order from a federal judge requiring Apple to write the needed code to access to the device. Apple strongly pursued the reversal of this ruling and had been joined by a number of other technology companies in its court battle. The Department of Justice reportedly dropped the legal proceeding when an anonymous third party managed to efficaciously unlock the phone.

The FBI has so far not openly divulged what was found in Farook's iPhone, but a source familiar with the investigation revealed that the agency could not succeed in recovering anything substantial from the phone.

Tagsapple, Microsoft, US government, San Bernardino, california, Data Protection, FBI