14 DAY TRIAL // As reported to you yesterday, Microsoft appeared in a New York court on Thursday in a lawsuit against the United States government, trying to protect its choice of not disclosing user details stored on data centers based in other countries.
US District Judge Loretta Preska, however, ruled against the software giant, thus ordering Microsoft to provide the United States government with access to the details officials want to approach, even though this information might be stored on non-US data centers.
"It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information," the judge said, explaining that although user details were located abroad, it was an American company that controlled them.
Microsoft, however, believes that a search warrant issued in the United States is not valid in other countries and mentioned in court documents that the government had no right to access details stored on a server located in Ireland.
"Congress has not authorized the issuance of warrants that reach outside US territory. The government cannot seek and a court cannot issue a warrant allowing federal agents to break down the doors of Microsoft’s Dublin facility,” the company explained.
And still, the judge ordered against Microsoft, but decided to temporarily suspend the decision in order to allow the company to appeal to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Brad Smith, the general counsel and executive vice president for legal and corporate affairs at Microsoft, said in a column published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that the government was looking to sidestep rules that make an United States search warrant valid only in the country and cannot reach beyond US shores.
“In court filings, it argues that your emails become the business records of a cloud provider. Because business records have a lower level of legal protection, the government claims that it can use its broader authority to reach emails stored anywhere in the world,” Smith added.
Microsoft has already expressed its intention to continue fighting government orders to block agencies from accessing consumer data stored overseas, in a move that’s clearly supposed to protect its business on other continents. It’s pretty obvious that in case the US government is allowed to access data on non-US servers, customers abroad might actually avoid using Microsoft’s solutions in search for enhanced privacy.
Smith, on the other hand, says that if the United States government is allowed to access data on some other data centers, other governments would issue similar requests very soon, so user privacy would be dramatically affected.
“If the U.S. government prevails in reaching into other countries' data centers, other governments are sure to follow. One already is. Earlier this month the British government passed a law asserting its right to require tech companies to produce emails stored anywhere in the world. This would include emails stored in the U.S. by Americans who have never been to the UK,” he concluded.