In spite of a recent court ruling to the contrary, the US Government still wants to serve search warrants to companies outside of its legal national jurisdiction. According to a report by the WSJ, The Obama Administration recently revealed that they had been working on these agreements for some time, and the first such search warrant exchange program with the United Kingdom was finishing completion. Just days after the landmark decision, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is already preparing to overturn the Microsoft ruling that protects data stored on non-United States servers from American warrants. Under the new proposed warrant exchange agreements, the US government could serve a warrant for stored information or real time wiretapping directly to a foreign company housed in an agreement accepting nation, and vice versa. The only redeeming caveat to this rule is that countries wouldn’t be able to serve search warrants regarding citizens of the target country, only non citizens.

United States to allow other countries to serve foreign search warrants to American Internet companies

The Obama Administration’s plans have a few hurdles in the way: the DOJ may appeal the Microsoft ruling to the US Supreme Court, and whatever agreements are made will still need to be approved by the legislature of both countries. By appealing the landmark case that Microsoft only recently won, the DOJ risks unleashing a pandora’s box of cross-border warrant serving. Currently, we only know of President Obama’s plans to set up cross-border search warrant reciprocity with the UK; however, there are more clandestine deals in the making – and even more data exchange mutual assistance legal treaties already exist.

Recent reshuffling of the UK leadership due to Brexit drama has all but assured that this proposed law will pass on that side of the pond. A government that is eager to force the end of end-to-end encryption will be more than willing to acquiesce to US data sharing demands. Privacy conscious Internet users have one realistic chance to stop this overreach of government power: halting the approval in Congress like we were able to do for the Anti-Terrorism Information Sharing Is Strength Act.