The application of federal search warrants issued under the Stored Communications Act has become increasingly problematic as more entities store some or all of their data outside of the United States, even if those entities can readily access that data within the United States.
In my April 2017 article, “A Walk in the Cloud: Search Warrants for Data Stored Outside the US,” I used the opinion of Magistrate Judge Thomas J. Rueter in In re Search Warrant No. 16-960-M-01 to Google, No. 16-960-M-O1 (E.D.PA Feb. 3), to discuss the problems of interpreting the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. Section 2703 (the SCA) when the government obtained search warrants to have digital carriers such as Google produce information that Google stored, for its convenience, outside of the United States. We considered those problems granularly, but they could be summed up by noting that the SCA was written years before the internet emerged, and attempts to amend the law through passage of the Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act, S. 512 (114th) (the LEADS Act), have gotten nowhere.
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