Supreme Court sounds wary of Microsoft's shield for emails stored abroad

Supreme Court justices sounded skeptical Tuesday about Microsoft's refusal to turn over emails sought by U.S. law enforcement agents with a criminal search warrant but stored by the software giant in overseas servers.

The case of the United States vs. Microsoft has been hailed by some as a major test of privacy in a world where electronic traffic is stored in a digital cloud. Many observers say the federal law known as the Stored Communications Act of 1986 is hopelessly outdated. And some said the court should stand aside until Congress adopts a new law.

But most of the justices seemed to agree with Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben, who argued that the court needed to decide the case before them based on the current law and on the idea that a criminal search warrant from a judge must be honored.

The dispute arose during a routine federal drug trafficking investigation in the New York area. In 2013, federal agents went to court there and obtained a search warrant based on probable cause for "all emails" for a still-unidentified Microsoft customer. But when the warrant was served at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., the company refused to turn over the contents of the emails, saying they were held in a data center in Dublin, Ireland.

Source: latimes