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.
