A New York judge has ordered Microsoft to hand over Department of Justice emails which are stored in its Irish data centre.
According to eweek, Microsoft has vowed to appeal the ruling and has support from Verizon, Cisco, Apple and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who have all filed amicus briefs in support of the Redmond company.
Microsoft was originally ordered on July 31st to comply with a U.S. Department of Justice warrant to produce emails stored at the company’s data center in Dublin, Ireland. Manhattan’s U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled that Microsoft must turn over the emails to the DOJ, despite the fact that they reside on overseas servers. In a judgment that is sure to have implications for American cloud providers, Preska determined that since the data is stored and controlled by a U.S.-based company, the Government can request it regardless of where it resides.
