In what has been a long-running legal battle between the U.S. government and Microsoft, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York reversed a 2014 ruling that compelled the company to turn over emails of a customer that were stored on a server in Ireland. Of the Stored Communications Act, the Second Circuit wrote, “We conclude that Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially ... Accordingly, the SCA does not authorize a U.S. court to issue and enforce an SCA warrant against a United States-based service provider for the contents of a customer’s electronic communications stored on servers located outside the United States. The SCA warrant in this case may not lawfully be used to compel Microsoft to produce to the government the contents of a customer’s email account stored exclusively in Ireland.”
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