That's the difficult case. Suppose you're the head of Microsoft Brasil, a Brazilian company 100% owned by Microsoft. You're a Brazilian citizen siting in your office in São Paulo, overseeing the local datacenter. A US court asks Microsoft to ask Microsoft Brasil for some data. The request arrives at your desk and it goes against local law. Do you comply and risk going to jail in Brazil or do you not comply and let your boss in the US go to jail? There's got to be precedent for this in the physical world. There's nothing special about data in a datacenter vs cargo in a warehouse for this scenario.
In cases like this, there is a difference: that data can be accessed from US soil, even while it is stored on foreign turf. Guns sitting in a warehouse cannot be used in the commission of a crime in the US; data on an email server in Brazil can be. And I bet that's the angle the US govt is taking on this.
It still reeks of a belief that other nations do not really have sovereignty.
>In cases like this, there is a difference: that data can be accessed from US soil, even while it is stored on foreign turf. Guns sitting in a warehouse cannot be used in the commission of a crime in the US; data on an email server in Brazil can be.
A distinction without a difference. If the argument is that the data can, at some unspecified future time, be brought to the US, you get to wait for that to happen to intercept it. Just like you would with cargo in a foreign port that you suspect is going to be shipped to the US.
But suppose you've already lost that argument in court in the US how does the head of Microsoft Brazil respond to the request? Microsoft seems to be screwed either way.
