US judge says search warrants extend to data stored outside the US. We disagree.

A magistrate judge in New York recently ruled that the United States government could use a search warrant to obtain an individual customer’s emails that Microsoft stored in Dublin, Ireland. The decision is contrary to well-accepted law that US courts are not empowered to issue warrants for foreign searches.

As important, the decision failed to take into account substantial international commerce and policy implications of an “extra-territorial” warrant.

It is worth noting that the consumer Internet-based email services at issue in the case before this magistrate judge are quite different from cloud computing and hosting services offered to business customers. We do not believe the magistrate judge’s decision would apply to Verizon’s non-US cloud services, where these overseas business customers process and/or store their data directly on servers outside the US.