It is a time honored convention: U.S. companies find ways to evade inconvenient or expensive laws by transferring operations to other states. So we’ve had U.S. corporations operating abroad to use child labor, run sweatshops or prevent taxes and stringent health and safety reviews. Now the U.S. government says something similar is occurring in regards to e-mail.

At issue is the question of whether businesses or people can retain the U.S. government from getting their e-mail by claiming that it lives on a server in a state that’s hostile to such investigations.

From their perspective, they’re challenging the federal government’s skill to get e-mail records if those documents are saved beyond the U.S. From the view of the government, the inquiry is whether legal questions can be skirted by a firm simply by selecting to house records in a more friendly state. Believe of Ireland in this situation as the e-mail equivalent of what the tax-preventing Swiss bank account used to be.

The difficulty, obviously, is that in 2015, the U.S. is attempting to implement years old, non-digital rules to digital scenarios. The fact is the fact that firms like Google, Amazon and Microsoft can have servers of all kinds sitting in dozens of places, some of them in server farms abroad.

Microsoft claims that it had a special reason behind putting the e-mails in question to the user on a server in Ireland: closeness. Or at least closeness to where it believes the user is situated. You see, Microsoft they are in Ireland can be told by MSN users, as well as the firm has zero mechanism for confirming that — not assessing IP address location.

“E-Mail accounts are assigned to the Dublin datacenter, according to Microsoft, predicated on the user’s own uncorroborated identification of their state of residence in the time the account is made. The stated purpose of the policy would be to decrease the geographical space between a user along with the datacenter that services the account,” the authorities said in its national appeals court filing last week. “Microsoft makes no attempt, nevertheless, to confirm the user’s state of residence in the time of enrollment or at any given time afterwards.

What began this case was one of its own MSN e-mail customers and an 2013 national search warrant.

The case strikes on several problems that are intriguing. Before you reply, what if the U.S. e-mail supplier that possesses that server typically obtained — for valid IT objectives — all of those messages from desks in the U.S.? As the touches zap in several nanoseconds electronically upon the world, who’s to say where they live? Could a firm typically transfer information from machines in a dozen states and have that information regulated solely by where it lives at that instant? What if copies reside in all these servers? Is this a world-wide e-mail variation of musical chairs?

The feds last week stated that it is not an issue of where the information remains, but who’s playing with the music. “Courts are empowered to use power on people and things over whom they have jurisdiction, even if this power has results abroad,” the feds composed. “The evaluation for the production of records is management, not place.”

Another problem: Who actually owns that data that is subpoenaed? Microsoft, which obviously never read conditions and its own MSN provisions, said that it is not up to Microsoft to rat on its consumers and the data is owned by its customers.

And Microsoft has countered with its own vibrant example: “Picture this scenario. Policemen of the local Stadtpolizei descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. They serve a warrant to confiscate a package of letters that are private a New York Times reporter is saving in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA division in Manhattan. Germany’s Foreign Minister replies: ‘We didn’t run an extraterritorial investigation — in fact nothing was searched by us . No German officer ever set foot in America. The Stadtpolizei just ordered a German firm to make its own business records, which were in its own possession, custody, and management. The American reporter’s privacy interests were completely protected, as the Stadtpolizei procured a warrant from a neutral magistrate.'”

Its purpose was subsequently made by Microsoft:

The consequence that all such data may be gotten by administrative subpoena as the authorities implies — is troubling, to say the least,” Daskal composed. “More significantly, the government does not recognize that even if there’s not an immediate conflict of laws, its strategy breaks the longstanding assumption against unilateral law enforcement measures in a different state’s territory. Of special matter, it opens the door for some other countries compelling ISPs to turn over information found in America, including that of U.S. citizens, perhaps for nefarious motives, and without respect to the dictates of the (Stored Communications Act). As the government notes, the UK has already passed such laws and others are going to certainly follow suit.”

The sole reason we give a get-out-of-jail-free card to diplomats is that other authorities will reciprocate. Having diplomats in some specific not-so-friendly nations would not be possible.

Let us bring this all back to e-mail and any other type of digital information that it’s to manage. Although it is definitely the simplest path for the authorities to simply smack a legal requirement on a U.S. business, the huge concern must be international precedent. Everyone in this particular case is selecting the most palatable characters for their arguments. Justice decided to take an attempt involving an accused drug dealer as its test case. Microsoft couched its counterargument when it comes to a U.S. journalist.