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US Supreme Court To Decide Microsoft Email Privacy Dispute (reuters.com)
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to resolve a major privacy dispute between the Justice Department and Microsoft Corp over whether prosecutors should get access to emails stored on company servers overseas. From a report: The justices will hear the Trump administration's appeal of a lower court's ruling last year preventing federal prosecutors from obtaining emails stored in Microsoft computer servers in Dublin, Ireland in a drug trafficking investigation. That decision by the New York-based 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals marked a victory for privacy advocates and technology companies that increasingly offer cloud computing services in which data is stored remotely. Microsoft, which has 100 data centers in 40 countries, was the first U.S. company to challenge a domestic search warrant seeking data held outside the country. There have been several similar challenges, most brought by Google.
This has nothing to do with "owning the world". If a Microsoft employee, located in the U.S., can access a server located in [some other country], then the location of that server is irrelevant. That is the argument being used by the U.S. government, and in this case they are correct.
To argue otherwise means:
You're claiming that a person located in the U.S. is governed by EU law, e.g., they can't access a server they own and control except in accordance with EU law, despite the fact that they are not in the EU. You are, in fact, trying to impose EU law on a person sitting at a computer in the U.S.
Any person/business located in the U.S. just has to put all their servers outside the U.S. and access them remotely and they become immune to all U.S. laws. Want to investigate Microsoft/Google/Whoever for securities fraud or some other wrong doing? Sorry, all their documents and e-mails are located on a server outside the U.S. and they don't have to give them to you.
Yes, a person in the U.S. can copy personal data from a computer located in the E.U. to a computer located in the U.S.. But doing so without the consent of the person the data belongs to is illegal in the E.U.. The European High Court has decided that even U.S. legal enforcement is not allowed to do so without serving a warrant to the responsible european court first. If a court in the U.S. decides otherwise it would be in contempt of the EHC. I wonder what happens if the EHC then serves a warrant against an U.S. court for doing so.