US court: Google must give foreign e-mails to FBI

Lately, Google has lost a court case (in Philadelphia) on e-mail data storage on foreign server, so that, according to the judgement, from now on the data should be sent to the US FBI security service.

The Court diverges from the existing case-law since, in a recent case, Microsoft has successfully denied the publication of data stored on servers in the European Union, and referred to the legal requirements in the EU.
As a reason for Google’s publishing obligation, the judge argued that Google is constantly copying data between its data centers, so that it should be only needed a further transfer of the data requested by the FBI to the US, in order for the FBI to access it. Although this could be a violation of the rights of the user, this violation would take place in the USA and because of that again covered by the law. According to the court, the data transfer therefore does not represent any access to foreign data anyway.

Following the proclamation of the judgment, Google has already commented on the procedure and announced to appeal against the decision, and continue to oppose to all official demands that go too far. Google has also explained that data is distributed on the servers around the world for technical reasons and in some cases it is not at all clear where the data is being stored. The verdict shows that each year Google receives from the US investigators somewhat 25,000 information requests.