George A. LoBiondo, Associate

Yesterday, we reported that the Department of Justice has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to remand its dispute with Microsoft Corp. concerning access to customer emails stored abroad to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit with instructions to dismiss it as moot.  The government argued that the newly enacted “CLOUD” Act clarifies prior law and makes clear that information stored abroad can, under certain circumstances, be subject to a domestic warrant.  The government added that it obtained a new warrant for Microsoft to turn over the requested information in the days following the CLOUD Act’s passage.

The fight over the privacy of electronic communications and the government’s ability to reach emails stored abroad in criminal investigations has finally moved to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is poised to finally answer the question that’s been plaguing federal courts across the country:  must U.S. tech companies comply with warrants issued under the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) that demand information from customer accounts that is stored on servers in a foreign country?

Another federal judge has rejected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit’s interpretation of the Stored Communications Act (SCA), and has ordered Google to hand over customer email traffic—wherever located—to U.S. law enforcement.  More than a year ago, the Second Circuit held that Microsoft Corp. was not required to produce customer emails stored on foreign servers in response to an SCA warrant.  Since then, the Second Circuit’s ruling has been rejected by three different federal courts around the country.

We previously posted about a case before the New York Court of Appeals that concerned whether Facebook has the legal standing to challenge search warrants seeking its users’ data.  In April, the court sided with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and rejected Facebook’s challenge.  The three opinions by the judges—particularly the concurrence by Judge Jenny Rivera—provide insight into this evolving area of law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) and the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) have weighed in on Facebook’s high-profile dispute with a social media aggregation company over whether it had unlawfully accessed Facebook’s computers.  The EFF and ACLU warned the Ninth Circuit that the panel’s ruling for Facebook risks chilling important investigations and makes “potential criminals out of millions of ordinary Americans on the basis of innocuous online behavior.”  The case is Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc., No. 13-17102. 

Has North Korea struck again?  Do its recent attacks signal a shift from those motivated by political retribution to those motivated by financial gain?  What does this mean for financial institutions?

After several fits and starts, Congress finally passed the Cyber Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA) as part of the omnibus budget bill.  President Obama signed the bill into law on December 18, 2015.