On July 31, 2014, Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District of New York affirmed an order by Magistrate James Francis obligating Microsoft Corp. to produce emails stored on servers in Ireland. Commentators were quick to claim that the decision would have disastrous consequences for U.S. cloud-service providers, with one author going so far as to claim that Preska “single-handedly killed trust in the U.S. technology industry.” However, such claims are simply not true.
By way of background, on December 4, 2013, Francis, upon application by the United States, issued a search warrant under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) that directed Microsoft to produce the contents of one of its customer’s email accounts. After determining that some of the requested materials were hosted on servers in Dublin, Microsoft moved to quash the warrant to the extent it requested documents stored outside of the United States. Microsoft argued that such documents could not be requested with an SCA warrant, as that would constitute a prohibited extraterritorial search and seizure.
