Google has been ordered by a federal court in Pennsylvania to comply with search warrants and produce customer emails stored abroad, in a decision that is in sharp contrast to that of an appeals court in a similar case involving Microsoft.
Magistrate Judge Thomas J. Rueter of the U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled Friday that the two warrants under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) for emails required by the government in two criminal investigations constituted neither a seizure nor a search of the targets‘ data in a foreign country.
Transferring data electronically from a server in a foreign country to Google’s data center in California does not amount to a seizure because “there is no meaningful interference with the account holder’s possessory interest in the user data,” and Google’s algorithm in any case regularly transfers user data from one data center to another without the customer’s knowledge, Judge Rueter wrote.
He added that when Google produces the electronic data in accordance with the search warrants, and the government views it, the invasion of the account holder’s privacy — the searches — will take place in the U. S.
In the Microsoft case, which was cited by Google, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York quashed a warrant that would have required the company to disclose contents of emails stored on a server in Ireland. The court said in its opinion that the SCA under which the warrant was served “does not authorize courts to issue and enforce against U.
