With the end of the oral arguments in United States v. Microsoft Corp., legal experts are still in the dark about how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the case. But factors that will influence the court's decision have come into focus, according to former government officials.

Any decision, they say, is likely be influenced more by the statutory interpretation of Stored Communication Act (SCA) than by the technology specifics of the case, which revolves around the U.S. government forcing Microsoft to hand over emails stored in Ireland under an SCA warrant.

To be sure, the court's justices did seek to understand the finer points of how the emails in question were stored, accessed and transmitted back from Ireland. Justice Samuel Alito, for instance, asked how information can be obtained when it is “broken it up into shards so that it's stored not just in one foreign country but in a number of foreign countries.”

But outside counsel for Microsoft in the case, E. Joshua Rosenkranz of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, said, “No one actually breaks up the email into shards, certainly not in this case. That's not what Microsoft does,” nor Google or Gmail.

Rosenkranz explained the email is stored physically in Ireland and accessed by a “physical piece of hardware.” When pressed, he added that someone in Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, can extract the information from Ireland remotely without the help of an employee overseas. “A human being doesn't have to do it,” he said. “It is a robot.”

The concept initially puzzled Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Guess my imagination is running wild,” she said. “Who tells the robot what to do, and what does the robot do?”

David Newman, a former special assistant and associate counsel to President Barack Obama and former member of the National Security Council, noted that the unfamiliarity justices had with the specific IT processes involved in the case make it unlikely that those facts will play a key role in their decision.

“I think it will be challenging for the court to come up with a rule that distinguishes different kinds of cross-border data storage practices from one another,” said Newman, who is now of counsel at Morrison & Foerster.

Even though the high court has access to expert knowledge on the technicalities of the case, including an amicus brief filed by 51 computer scientists, they may still be hesitant to have such information influence their ruling too heavily, should they be seen as advocating for a specific type of technology process.

“For policy reasons, I don't think there should be preference for some type of storage method over the other,” said John Carlin, former assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and chair of Morrison & Foerster's Global Risk and Crisis Management Group.

“There are a range of facts and factors that will drive how the justices rule, including the technical details,” said Paul Rosen, partner at Crowell & Moring and a former chief of staff to past Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. “But I think the decision is going to turn on how the justices view larger issues of privacy, technology and the appropriate reach of law enforcement under the Stored Communications Act.”

Indeed, the justices spent far more time dissecting the statutory language of the SCA than weighing the technical specifics of the case. There was disagreement, for example, over whether to interpret the SCA Section 2703 warrant as a traditional warrant, which cannot apply extraterritoriality.

“Among the government arguments is that the warrant should be viewed as akin to a subpoena,” Newman said. “But not all of the justices seemed to accept that based on their oral arguments.”

More broadly, Microsoft argued that the SCA was a statute that regulates stored data, while the government argued its focus was on disclosing data.

As Justice Elena Kagan explained in the oral arguments: “I mean, it seems as though we have a choice between two things: One is what Congress is doing is it's regulating the disclosure in the United States of electronic communications that are stored everywhere in the world. And that's what the government is saying.”

On the other hand, Microsoft's argument is that Congress meant to “regulate the disclosure anywhere in the world of electronic communications that are stored in the United States,” she added.

The question put forth before the Supreme Court is whether one side's interpretation is less disruptive to U.S. foreign relations, law enforcement's search abilities and citizens' privacy.

“Each side argued that their position represented a rule that is more stable to the status quo and that the other side's position required a new Congressional action,” Morrison & Foerster's Newman said.

But many justices expressed the notion that there better venues to resolve such statutory questions. “The justices may disagree on the merits of the case, but they clearly agreed the best forum to resolve this was not the court, but Congress,” Carlin said.

Several justices, for example, pointed out that there is bipartisan legislation, the CLOUD Act, in Congress that would address these issues before the court and update the 1986 legislation. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said that, though a court can rule definitively for one side or another, that might not be the best outcome.

“Congress takes a look at this, realizing that much time and innovation has occurred since 1986. It can write a statute that takes account of various interests. And it isn't just all or nothing,” she said. “So wouldn't it be wiser just to say let's leave things as they are? If Congress wants to regulate in this brave new world, it should do it.”