Judges back US government in Microsoft battle over offshore e-mails
‘Microsoft could tell customers: Don’t worry if the government wants to get access to your communications; they won’t be able to’
Manhattan — Several US Supreme Court justices expressed support for the government on Tuesday in its fight with Microsoft over whether a decades-old law lets government investigators get digital information stored on overseas servers. The Trump administration is challenging a lower-court ruling that barred federal law enforcement officials from using the 1986 Stored Communications Act to get a suspected drug trafficker’s e-mails, which were kept on a Microsoft server in Ireland. During an hour-long argument, the justices struggled to decide how a law older than the World Wide Web affects law enforcement in the era of cloud computing. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested Microsoft’s argument would put out of the government’s reach an e-mail sent from the Supreme Court building to someone just a block away, if the company had chosen to store it on a server outside the US. Nothing would keep Microsoft "from storing US communications, every one of them, either in Canada or Mexico or any...
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