By now you should have read chapter 2, on privacy.
On Tuesday, Feb 27, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the so-called "Microsoft Ireland" case.
In 2013, Microsoft received a warrant for data stored on its servers about a particular individual. Microsoft challenged the warrant, on the grounds that the data resided in a data center in Ireland, and so the US should go through the appropriate treaty channels to request the data.
Microsoft lost at the District Court level, but won in 2016 in the Second Circuit.
In a normal "Rule 41" federal search warrant, the police just come in and take stuff. They clearly could not apply that idea to this case, because the data is in Ireland, and Microsoft would refuse to give the police online access.
But a Stored Communications Act warrant is a little different: it's a demand for the provider to supply the information. That would be Microsoft here. In this sense, and this sense only, is the case about the SCA.
With a Rule 41 warrant, the police must go to a judge in the district of the property or data to be searched. So that makes the SCA warrant sound even more like the correct tool here.
To reduce the question to one of so-called "statutory interpretation", it becomes does the SCA warrant process apply to extra-territorial seizures?
But there's also a broader question of the conflict of treaty
law with domestic law. And, indirectly, whether Microsoft and other US
providers can survive in the cloud marketplace if they're required to
treat all the data as under direct US jurisdiction.
A transcript of the oral arguments is at www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2017/17-2_j4ek.pdf.
A note about Mozilla Firefox about:config and security.tls.version.min, and torproject.org.
You'd think they would be using a newer version of TLS!
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