“It makes clear that the USA government can no longer seek to use its search warrants on a unilateral basis to reach into other countries and obtain the emails that belong to people of other nationalities”, says Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft.
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A federal appeals court on Thursday said the USA government can not force Microsoft Corp and other companies to turn over customer emails stored on servers outside the United States. The US Justice Department had sued the company for civil contempt of court for its failure to comply with the warrant.
The case began in late 2013, when a USA district court ordered Microsoft to turn over customer email data stored in a Dublin data center. And, just a reminder, Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington.
The case might still be revisited by the Supreme Court, so there is still a chance that the ruling may be rescinded. Despite support from Apple, AT&T, Cisco and Verizon, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of NY upheld the search warrant issued almost two years ago. Prosecutors said that because the data was hosted by a US-based company, Microsoft must comply. There were also fears that a ruling against Microsoft would lead to a mass exodus of worldwide firms from United States cloud providers.
Microsoft, backed by numerous world’s biggest names in tech, had previously lost an appeal to quash a warrant.
The U.S. and Britain are already negotiating an agreement where both partners could directly serve companies with wiretap orders and warrants – to intercept real-time communications and collect stored communications.
It is the traditional task of Congress, in enacting legislation, and of the courts, in interpreting the Fourth Amendment, to strike a balance between privacy interests and law enforcement needs.
“Neither explicitly nor implicitly does the statute envision the application of its warrant provisions overseas”, she wrote. In 2014 a judge ruled that Microsoft would have to grant access to the emails – a decision Microsoft subsequently launched an appeal against.
Microsoft had argued that warrants mentioned in the Stored Communications Act carry geographical limitations, and they can not be used to seize items from US companies that are stored overseas.
CDT expects the United States government to appeal the decision and will continue to advocate for ECPA and MLAT reforms to address the challenge of cross-border data demands.
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Speaking of the Stored Communications Act of 1986 Judge Gerard Lynch remarked that he agreed with the result although was critical of the fact that by storing data overseas Microsoft could protect information from the authorities.
