Comment by ahakki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahakki | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a very important case. If the SCOTUS rules in favor of the US then corps which are active in both the US and the EU will be stuck having to decide who’s laws to follow. Unilateral extraterritorial application of domestic laws is rarely a good idea, especially when a bilateral mutual legal assistance treaty already exists (which the US didn’t use in this case).

The following amicus briefs are a good read introduction to the case:

Brief amici curiae of Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie e.V., Deutscher Industrie- und Handelskammertag e.V., Ibec clg, Konfederacja Lewiatan, and Mouvement des Enterprises de France filed. (Distributed) http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-2/27520/20180111...

Brief amicus curiae of European Commission on Behalf of the European Union in support of neither party filed. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-2/23633/2017121...

———

These are way to long to read completly, but already a quick browse can be enlightening:

Brief of petitioner United States filed. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-2/22902/2017120...

Brief of respondent Microsoft Corporation filed. (Distributed) Jan 17 2018 https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-2/27619/2018011...

———

HN Readers might also enjoy this one:

Brief amicus curiae of 51 COMPUTER SCIENTISTS filed:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-2/28101/2018011...

There's no reason to believe a multinational corporation can roll out a service globally and maintain it consistently with all nations's laws. See for example Google in China. They could always segment their services or be split into multiple companies.

Although it would be convenient to live in a legally consistent world, I think we are in a much better situation than hundreds of years ago, when the largest corporation had its own laws, its own army, and the ability to carry out the death penalty.

> See for example Google in China.

Yes, Google’s Services in China are adapted to local laws. But China only applies those laws inside it’s territory. China is not demanding that Google block “Tank Man”-Videos outside of China. The US wants to apply the Stored Communications Act outside of it’s territory (In casu to Ireland).

The US wants to apply the Stored Communications Act outside of it’s territory (In casu to Ireland).

Devil's-advocate point of view: if SCOTUS decides in Microsoft's favor, won't that give them carte blance to play "keep away" with any data sought by law enforcement? Any potentially-sensitive data would presumably be stored outside the US's borders in that case, in a country with laws sympathetic to the company's interests. I just don't see a good argument to be made for allowing a company chartered under US law to behave this way.

IMO, if Microsoft has the ability to access the data, then they have the responsibility to turn it over in response to a legitimate court order. The fact that they chose to store the data on a server in Ireland, a server in Washington, or a server in orbit around Mars seems immaterial. If it's under their control, it's under their control.

> Any potentially-sensitive data would presumably be stored outside the US's borders in that case, in a country with laws sympathetic to the company's interests. I just don't see a good argument to be made for allowing a company chartered under US law to behave this way.

well currently than they need to search a country that would not coporate. Currently if some bad guy would store sensitive/illegal or whatever data in germany and the us would come and ask for it, the german law enforcement would check if the request (would meet all requirements in the german law for data search, etc) is valid and if it would, they would hand over the data. that's how it should happen and how it actually happens to some extent.

But this isn't just "some bad guy" stashing data on a foreign server. The person who is the target of the search warrant handed his data over to a third party, a corporation operating under US law.

The fact that it's currently stored on a server that happens to be outside the US strikes me as one of those clever technicalities that impresses us nerds but doesn't impress judges.

The issues are not actually technological here.

These data access/privacy/disclosure issues could have and did exist in the days of paper records. The tech stuff is just a spurious justification for stepping around 200 years of treaties this country has signed, many of which cover jurisdictional issues wrt multi-national companies.

Yeah, about that:

https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/feb/no-error-here-microso...

Can you clarify how segmenting the services has any effect on this? It seems that even if Microsoft had an entirely EU-only product that the same rules would apply for accessing the data.

Microsoft could do it like some other companies do it, like League of Legends in China which is leased (the whole software) to another company and not hosted by Riot Games. (well it was like that in the past, hosted by tencent until the company took over riot as a whole. but sea servers are still provided by garena as far as I know)

Currently Microsoft already has a partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany (https://cloud.telekom.de/software/office-365/) and they could easily lease the whole Office365 suite to Telekom, but that means that they get less money (at the moment it is still operated by microsoft and telekom is only there for additional trust and control). At the moment Office365 by Telekom is still hosted by Microsoft and Azure Germany is hosted by Microsoft aswell, but I guess they could lease it, if they really need to.

1Password also does this for their 1Password.eu accounts, of which the data is stored on EU AWS, which in turn is operated by ‘Amazon Web Services GmbH‘ :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com