Microsoft is headed back to court this week in its long-standing effort to fight a U.S. Department of Justice search warrant seeking access to a crime suspect’s digital documents stored on a server in Ireland.

The company, on the losing side of two lower court decisions, including one from mid-2014, will argue its case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday.

Microsoft and its allies have argued that the DOJ didn’t have the authority to seek the December 2013 search warrant, related to a New York criminal case, because the suspect’s data resides in Dublin data center. If the DOJ insists its search warrants extend to overseas data, the agency will expose U.S. citizens’ data to searches by other governments, Microsoft has argued.

The case raises questions about law enforcement reach and data privacy, said Craig Newman, a cybersecurity lawyer at the Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler law firm in New York City.

“If the U.S. government is permitted to serve warrants on U.S. technology companies and obtain email that is stored in other countries, will it cause other countries to serve warrants on tech companies for the private communications of American citizens stored in U.S. data centers owned by foreign companies?” Newman and colleague George LoBiondo wrote in a recent blog post.

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Browsing Privacy: (PC World) – Microsoft headed to court to protect Irish data from US DOJ search

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