Research On The Lawsuit Of Microsoft V.United States Extraterritorial Data Acquisition

On July 14,2016,Microsoft won the warrant case against U.S.Government.The company has been fighting since 2013 to resist turning over the emails,which are stored in an Irish data center.The U.S.Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that Microsoft is not required to comply with a warrant for the users’ emails if the data is not stored within the United States.Microsoft’s case began in 2013,when a New York district court issued a warrant for emails and additional information about one of the company’s customers.When the data is.stored within the U.S,the government could acquire data in the legal warrant or other acceptable ways.Herein lies a key policy aspect of the problem raised by Microsoft concerning the Government’s unilateral acquisition of foreign-stored data.The analysis mainly discusses about the meaning and limit of extraterritorial jurisdiction and the data sovereignty.Data is generally produced in our daily life,which is recorded as information initially.With the process of collecting,organizing and analyzing,data has various attributes and applications.In the big data era,data is regarded as a kind of property.The government should attach great importance on data,no matter in the purpose of individual privacy or national security.Any type of data could not be acquired casually,especially the extraterritorial data.Therefore,quantities of countries stipulate data nationalism so as to prevent the essential data from acquiring and transferring-beyond the border.The effective way to protect data sovereignty is defining physical boundary.Data stored domestically has impact on extraterritorial jurisdiction principles.Traditional jurisdiction principles are still the main principles of extraterritorial jurisdiction,only interpreting the traditional ones into flexible ones.Although the case is not directly related to data sovereignty,the result normalizes the boundary concept of data sovereignty.Meanwhile,the interests of Internet service providers,data users and the government should in a balanced condition.Furthermore,the MLAT system must be simplified to provide recourses to the ongoing trend of data acquisition.China is at the primary stage of data legislation.We should make a point of data classification and data jurisdiction to approach the ultimate aim of individual data privacy and national data security.