What’s at stake in the Microsoft Supreme Court case

Say you sign up for a free email account. You live in country A, the tech company providing the email service is headquartered in country B, and the data center where the emails are stored is in country C. If the police in one country want your emails, where do they have to go, and whom do they have to ask?

That’s the logistical nightmare lurking in the background of US v. Microsoft, a case that will be heard before the Supreme Court on February 28th. In US v. Microsoft, law enforcement served a specific kind of warrant — called a Section 2307 warrant — under the Stored Communications Act (SCA), seeking the emails of someone who had signed up for an email account with Microsoft. (This person may or may not be a foreign national; it’s not...

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