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posted by on Tuesday February 07 2017, @06:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-if-some-american-ones-slip-in-there-who-will-notice? dept.

A U.S. judge has ordered Google to hand over emails stored outside the country in order to comply with an FBI search warrant. The warrant in question pertains to a domestic fraud probe.

The ruling is notable because it goes against an appeals court judgement last year — recently upheld — pertaining to Microsoft customer data held in servers outside the US. In that instance a federal court ruled the company did not have to hand over data stored on its servers in Ireland to the US government, declining to "disregard the presumption against extraterritoriality," as the judge put it.

However in the Google case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter ruled on Friday that the act of transferring emails from a foreign server did not qualify as a seizure. According to Reuters, the judge ruled there is no "meaningful interference" with the account holder's "possessory interest", going on to assert that any privacy infringement occurs "at the time of disclosure in the United States", rather than when the data itself is transferred.

Google's legal team had sought to use the Microsoft ruling as precedent to challenge the warrant's scope. The company had turned over data that was stored in the US only. In a statement it said it will be appealing the judgement. "The magistrate in this case departed from precedent, and we plan to appeal the decision. We will continue to push back on overbroad warrants," it said.

Both cases involve warrants issued under a 1986 federal law called the Stored Communications Act, which — as you can imagine, given its date-stamp — has long been described as a "woefully outdated" piece of legislation vs the technology it is now being used to regulate.

Source:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/04/google-told-to-hand-over-foreign-emails-in-fbi-search-warrant-ruling/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:04AM (#464373)

    Thus you might as well summarize the article as: "US court: Russia can legally read all gmail emails from all over the world."

    Hardly. If Russia told Google to hand over emails, and Google replied "well the US courts say we don't need to," do you think Russia would care at all? Russia can already tell Google what to do and not do, as can China, Dubai, etc. Remember Blackberry, or the hoops Google had to jump through to enter China?

    The way to read this is:

    "Country (USA, China, Russia, etc) tells Google, 'in order to operate legally in our country, you need to follow our rules.'" The company can reply by either following the rules, not going to the country, operating illegally, or petition for the rules to be reconsidered or changed.

    Currently a part of the USA government are telling Google that one of the rules is to hand over this data, and Google is doing that petition. They could do any of the other options as well. However, regardless of the rules USA tries to enforce on Google, it has no bearing on what other countries do.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:51AM (#464380)

    "In order to operate legally in our country you have to violate the laws of other countries you are operating in and enforce US jurisdiction in these other countries as well."
    Better?

  • (Score: 1) by mattTheOne on Wednesday February 08 2017, @02:27AM

    by mattTheOne (1788) on Wednesday February 08 2017, @02:27AM (#464405)

    That's exactly the quagmire here, US courts are trying to enforce jurisdiction in another sovereign country. Unless the FBI gets the warrant through Interpol/wherever in Ireland/Somali/Wherever the servers are hosted, it leaves America to Russia or more realistically China requesting data, and seizing US companies abroad for non-compliance.

    IANAL and its apparent to me this is dumb, really don't understand judges sometime or where they get their education from.