Supreme Court Case Between Microsoft And The United States

This Supreme Court case between Microsoft and the United States government initially started from a drug trafficking case that occurred in December of 2013. A New York County judge issued a warrant to retrieve electronic data regarding this case that was denied by Microsoft based on a law created in 1986 known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. This response from Microsoft led to an appeal to the Second Circuit court which resulted in a decision on Microsoft’s behalf. The court's decision held that the government cannot force internet service providers to turn over data stored in other countries, even with a warrant. The United States government, in turn, appealed the Second Circuit court’s decision which moved the case to the Supreme Court.

Microsoft is an American stationed corporation and is one of the leading global retailers and designers of computer software. Although Microsoft's corporate headquarters is located in Redmond, Washington, it has offices in more than 60 countries worldwide. Like many software companies, Microsoft is challenged with having to store its data. One of today's options for storing this data is the cloud.

When something is in the cloud it is stored on internet servers instead of your computer’s hard drive. Dropbox and Google Drive are some of the most commonly used cloud-based storage services. One is able to access the cloud from anywhere, so long as their device has internet access, regardless of where the internet servers are located. This all holds true even for emails and texts sent from your phone. So when you delete an email, photo, text, etc. it is never really deleted but instead is moved throughout the servers. With respect to this Supreme Court case, the requested data happens to be in Dublin,