From InfoWorld: Microsoft believes its refusal to turn over email held in Ireland to the U.S. government got a boost from an opinion of the Supreme Court on Monday, which upheld that U.S. laws cannot apply extraterritorially unless Congress has explicitly provided for it.
In a decision Monday in a separate case on the extraterritorial application of a provision of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Supreme Court set out the ground rules for its analysis, pointing out that "absent clearly expressed congressional intent to the contrary, federal laws will be construed to have only domestic application." The court was applying a canon of statutory construction known as the presumption against extraterritoriality.
It stated that the "the question is not whether we think 'Congress would have wanted' a statute to apply to foreign conduct 'if it had thought of the situation before the court,' but whether Congress has affirmatively and unmistakably instructed that the statute will do so."
The statements by the Supreme Court, which were cited on Tuesday in a notice of supplemental authority in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by Microsoft's lawyer, E. Joshua Rosenkranz, appear to be in accordance with Microsoft's own argument that nowhere did the U.S. Congress say that the Electronics Communications Privacy Act "should reach private emails stored on provider's computers in foreign countries."
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