Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger.

On today's show, what happens when law enforcement wants to look at someone's data,

but that data is stored in Ireland? What happens when a company like Microsoft gets served a warrant?

But again, the data is stored in Ireland. Well, last week,

the second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided in favor of Microsoft's challenge of a warrant,

demanding that the company turnover emails stored abroad. Joining me to discuss this is Greg Nojime,

director of the Freedom, Security, and Technology Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, that is CDT for short.

Greg, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me, Evan.

So this is a landmark case in privacy, and it's really an informative case about how we think about law enforcement being able to get data that are stored all over the world.

And this is a very common thing,

where there are data about Europeans stored in the United States, data about Americans stored in

Europe. The internet is naturally a global entity and data flows all over the place. But this really

causes jurisdictional problems when law enforcement need access to data. So just tell us the basics of the case.

This was a criminal case. Why was Microsoft being asked to do this and why did they fight back?

So the Department of Justice served a warrant on Microsoft demanding that it disclosed data

that Microsoft had stored in Ireland.

Actually, the government was seeking two types of data.

First, communications content of a user whose nationality was never identified.

And second, the metadata of that same user.

Microsoft had access to the metadata here in the United States. It turned it over

pursuant to the warrant. It said, though, with respect to the content, that the content was

...