Thought your data was safe outside America after the Microsoft ruling? Think again
The US Department of Justice will be happy campers after a court ruled that Google can’t avoid complying with domestic search warrants for data held overseas.
Last month, Microsoft won a crucial legal battle in the Second Circuit on just this point when a court ruled that police couldn’t grab data from foreign servers with just a Stored Communications Act warrant, but instead needed to go through existing data sharing agreements with other governments. The DoJ has appealed and it’s likely to go to the Supreme Court.
But in a similar case against Google, the district court of Eastern Pennsylvania ruled that the Chocolate Factory had to cough up emails stored overseas after it was served with a search warrant. The judge ruled [PDF] that there were enough differences between the two cases for the Microsoft ruling not to apply.
“Google regularly transfers user data from one data center to another without the customer’s knowledge,” said Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter.
“Such transfers do not interfere with the customer’s access or possessory interest in the user data. Even if the transfer interferes with the account owner’s control over his information, this interference is de minimis and temporary.”
The judge ruled that the two search warrants must be obeyed by Google, since it routinely stores such data overseas and the files would only be opened in the US – so it wasn’t, in his opinion, a foreign search. Also, unlike the Microsoft case, the search warrant was served against a US citizen, not a foreigner.
“The court suggests that bringing a file back to the United States is not a seizure because Google moves data around all the time and ‘this interference is de minimis and temporary’,” said Professor Orin Kerr of the George Washington University Law School.
“I don’t think that works. Google is a private company not regulated by the Fourth Amendment, so whether it moves around data is irrelevant. And I don’t see what is ‘de minimis and temporary’ about the government ordering Google to make a copy of your email pursuant to a court order.” ®
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/04/google_must_provide_emails_held_overseas/