Power Play

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

   Some time ago, the U.S. government demanded a trove of emails from Microsoft in a case involving an accused drug dealer. Microsoft refused the warrant, on the grounds that the computer server holding the stuff was not in the U.S. but in Ireland, and therefore the U.S. warrant had no jurisdiction.
   Government lawyers pursued the case through several levels, and now it's headed for the Supreme Court.
   This could have been avoided, according to a former attorney general for Ireland, if the U.S. had simply asked the Irish government for the information. The Irish government then could go to an Irish court for an Irish search warrant. But no, U.S. prosecutors insisted that a warrant issued to an American company must be complied with, no matter where the relevant stuff -- in this case digital emails -- was stored. In this case, it was an American company with facilities in Ireland. The Irish government itself did not have the data.
   Now here comes the problem. If the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the warrant and rules against Microsoft, then every piece of data owned by anyone in the world, if stored on an American-owned computer server, could be subject to a warrant issued by an American court against an American company. This would include Apple, Google, Yahoo and other U.S. companies as well as Microsoft.
   It could also affect American operations of foreign owned businesses. And if the U.S. can issue search warrants against overseas operations of American companies, it follows that other nations could follow that legal precedent and issue search warrants for data stored on computers in the U.S.
   Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.