Technology has fundamentally changed the way we all store our information, and that has put technology companies on the front lines of the fight to ensure private data are protected as well in the digital age as in the past. This fight is now playing out in a lawsuit in New York, where the US government is urging a court to ignore the true nature of digitally stored information so that it can avoid clear limits on search-and-seizure authority. The court should instead reaffirm limits on government power to preserve critical privacy protections.
Up on appeal is a case from the US District Court in the Southern District of New York in which the government served Microsoft Corp. with a search warrant directing it to produce the contents of a customer’s email account. Microsoft determined that it had stored the content on a server in Dublin. Rather than produce the email content, the company produced only data stored in the United States and moved to dismiss the warrant to conduct an exterritorial search at the government’s behest. (more…)