Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Does US Have Right To Data On Overseas Servers? We're About To Find Out (arstechnica.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the thinking-globally dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader quotes Ars Technica: The Justice Department on Friday petitioned the US Supreme Court to step into an international legal thicket, one that asks whether US search warrants extend to data stored on foreign servers. The US government says it has the legal right, with a valid court warrant, to reach into the world's servers with the assistance of the tech sector, no matter where the data is stored.

The request for Supreme Court intervention concerns a 4-year-old legal battle between Microsoft and the US government over data stored on Dublin, Ireland servers. The US government has a valid warrant for the e-mail as part of a drug investigation. Microsoft balked at the warrant, and convinced a federal appeals court that US law does not apply to foreign data.
According to the article, the U.S. government told the court that national security was at risk.

3 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'm all for privacy and all that... by jarkus4 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any employee of this local subsidiary can simply refuse to comply with the order (I expect every single country has a law that allows employee to refuse employer order to break the law). If we are talking about European countries then it would also be impossible to fire him for this, as such firing would be deemed as reprisal by (local) court. Given that the company (local subsidiary) is not even really interested in firing him, it would even likely lead to employee keeping the job (reinstatement).

  2. Re:I'm all for privacy and all that... by Sique · · Score: 4, Interesting
    But then the other court sends a "contempt of the court" verdict to the U.S. judge and asks the U.S. to expel him to face prosecution for violation of local law. Simply put: The U.S. might really want to have jurisdiction about data stored in other countries, but in the end, does it really matter? Whatever the U.S. judge decides, he can't really get it through without the cooperation of a court in another country.

    So why not go the way it has always been and should be in the future: Ask the court in the other country to help in that matter. If the U.S. court can prove that the data is really needed in a case, then it should be no problem to get it in a way legal in the country it is stored.

    If the idea of U.S. jurisdiction to data stored in other country really gets track, the only result will be that companies will no longer directly operate in other countries, but always have local intermediates which are legally independent of the U.S. company.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  3. Re:I'm all for privacy and all that... by Dracos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Precisely. This is the US government asserting jurisdiction where it clearly has none, using the tenuous arguments of "cyberspace has no borders" and "corporate citizenship traces back to its origin". If the SCOTUS agrees, then the US has taken a step toward delegitimizing every other nation's sovereignty, over yet another skirmish in the "war on drugs" inflated into a bogus national security concern.