The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to take on a landmark case between the federal government and Microsoft Corp.

The court will hear an appeal by the Trump administration following a lower court’s ruling that prevented law enforcement from using a traditional search warrant to obtain emails stored on servers in Dublin, Ireland, in a drug trafficking case.

In the original case, which started in 2013, investigators demanded data stored on Microsoft’s servers. Microsoft handed over data that was stored on domestic servers, but it refused to do the same for data stored in Ireland. Microsoft has 100 data centers in 40 countries.

In 2016, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit took Microsoft’s side on the matter, which at the time was seen as a victory for tech companies and for privacy advocates. Government lawyers have asked for the decision to be overturned, saying it “gravely threatens” public safety and national security.

“If U.S. law enforcement can obtain the emails of foreigners stored outside the United States, what’s to stop the government of another country from getting your emails even though they are located in the United States?” Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. “We believe that people’s privacy rights should be protected by the laws of their own countries and we believe that information stored in the cloud should have the same protections as paper stored in your desk.”

Smith argued that the Stored Communications Act of 1986 was written in the time of the floppy disk, not when data was stored all over the world. The law allows for probes into electronically stored information, but not when it’s stored outside the U.S. Allowing the government to get access to data abroad, Smith said, would set a dangerous precedent regarding people’s privacy. He also said that Congress should now act to pass new legislation more relevant to the times.

While we ask SCOTUS to uphold 2nd Cir, we need Congress to pass a law to both protect privacy & aid law enforcement. https://t.co/mgHBwme9So

— Brad Smith (@BradSmi) October 16, 2017

Thirty-three states signed a petition in favor of overturning the decision, stating that it had a detrimental effect on the states’ “ability to investigate crimes in their jurisdictions and to protect the safety of their residents.” The petition said it was remarkable that a technology company could shield data relating to crimes simply because electronically it had left a certain jurisdiction.

In court papers, Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall argued, “Under this opinion, hundreds if not thousands of investigations of crimes — ranging from terrorism, to child pornography, to fraud — are being or will be hampered by the government’s inability to obtain electronic evidence.”

Lawyer Joshua Rosenkranz, who has been representing Microsoft, sees it another way. “If that is the rule, that is a rule for global chaos,” he said. “Because other countries can do that to us. We would go crazy if China did that to us.”

Image: Hans via Pixabay