Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania magistrate judge decided Google needed to turn over data to US law enforcement despite it being housed (possibly temporarily) in overseas servers. The overseas housing was simply part of Google‘s data flow, which routes communications around the world for efficiency, rather than to keep them out of local governments‘ hands.

This contradicted an earlier decision by the 2nd Circuit Appeals Court, which ruled Microsoft did not have to turn over data held in overseas servers in response to a US search warrant.