WASHINGTON _ The Supreme Court gave a skeptical hearing Tuesday to lawyers for Microsoft who insist the company need not turn over emails that they have stored overseas, even if federal prosecutors have a search warrant from a judge.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Microsoft's position, if adopted by the high court, would be good news for "people who want to break the law."
They could conduct illegal business via email in the United States with the assurance their messages would remain safe and off-limits to U.S. investigators because they were held in Canada or Ireland, Roberts reasoned.
The case of the United States v. Microsoft has been hailed by some as a major test of privacy in a world where electronic traffic is stored in a digital cloud. Many observers say the federal law known as the Stored Communications Act of 1986 is hopelessly outdated.
But most of the justices seemed to agree with Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben, who argued that the court needed to decide the case before them based on the current law and on the extra weight given to search warrants.
The dispute arose during what looked like a routine federal drug investigation in New York. In 2013, agents went to court there and obtained a search warrant for "all emails" from a Microsoft customer.
But when the warrant was served at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., the company refused to turn over the contents of the emails, saying they were held in a data center in Dublin, Ireland.
To the surprise of federal authorities, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Microsoft that the federal law on "stored communications" did not allow for an "extraterritorial application."
The Supreme Court then agreed to hear the administration's appeal.
