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Microsoft Agrees To Contempt Order So It Can Appeal Email Privacy Case
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft made news some weeks ago for refusing to hand over customer emails stored on its Dublin, Ireland servers to the U.S. government. The district judge presiding over the case agreed with the government and ordered Microsoft to comply with its demands. On Monday, Microsoft struck a deal with the U.S. government in which the company would be held on contempt charges but would not be penalized for it until after the outcome of an appeal. The district judge endorsed the agreement (PDF) on Thursday.
The scope of jurisdiction in the ruling is clear cut. Physical presence on the USA. BTW there is no law. This has been existing law for two centuries. It is just being applied to computer data the same way it was to objects and paper historically. The difference is that law enforcement agencies didn't ask for multiple shipping containers full of paper documents but with big data search tools are perfectly comfortable asking for those kinds of quantities of electronic data.
Microsoft has already hedged themselves in Europe by informing their customers that using Azure is agreeing to export and to not upload any data for which would be illegal to export. So legally they should be fine in Europe.
Just because they put something in a license, doesn't make it legal.
For instance, EULA's are meaningless in a number of European countries.
Also, contract do not trump law. So if there are laws that prohibit this, the contract (or atleast those specific terms) is invalid.
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I know many governments already basically say "you can't store government data in a US cloud service or on a US server" for exactly this reason.
Make that "you can't store government data on any server from any company doing any kind of business within the US".
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It is actually illegal. You can't deliberate engage in activities to make it more expensive or complex for law enforcement to search subpoenaed records. That's contempt of court.