Microsoft has just won its appeal against the US Govement in a long-ruing case over their request to access data Microsoft held in Ireland on an Irish national.
The case began in December 2013 when a New York district court judge issued a warrant asking Microsoft to produce all emails and private information associated with a certain account hosted by Microsoft. The account’s emails were stored on a server located in Dublin, Ireland, one of many datacenters held by Microsoft around the world to improve the speed of service it provides its non-U.S. customers. Microsoft provided account information kept on its U.S. servers but refused to tu the emails over, arguing that a U.S. judge has no authority to issue a warrant for information stored abroad. Microsoft moved to vacate the warrant for the content held abroad on 18 December 2013. In May 2014, a federal magistrate judge disagreed with Microsoft and ordered it to tu over the emails. Microsoft appealed to the District Court for the Southe District of New York.
The district court found in favour of the govement and Microsoft appealed to the Second Circuit.
Today the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York overtued the court order requiring Microsoft to tu over to the U.S. govement the contents of a customer’s email account stored on an Irish server.
Microsoft insists that if the US govement wanted access to the data they should pursue existing legal avenues to access the data, such as going through the EU mechanisms for law enforcement and data transfer. Ireland’s govement coming out in support of Microsoft and even offering to speed up evaluation of any request that the US govement would make in this case.
The win is good news for both privacy advocates and US cloud businesses, as if the US Govement prevailed in its insistence that it has jurisdiction over any data held overseas by an American company it would have a damaging effect on the business of cloud service companies such as Microsoft and Google, who may be shut out of markets such as the EU with tight privacy laws.