LONDON — The Irish government has given qualified support to Microsoft’s efforts to block the American authorities from seizing a customer’s emails that are stored in Ireland.
The move is linked to a continuing legal dispute over a United States search warrant for emails related to a drug trafficking investigation. Those messages are stored in a Microsoft data center in Dublin.
While several courts in the United States have declared that the search warrant is lawful, Microsoft has argued that allowing the American authorities to issue search warrants for content overseas could set a dangerous precedent and increase privacy tensions between that country and the rest of the world.
In a legal brief supporting Microsoft’s appeal, the Irish government said that courts in the United States should respect the sovereignty of other countries when issuing search warrants, though it added that Ireland and the United States had existing treaties that could allow the data to be shared with the American authorities.
“Ireland has a genuine and legitimate interest in potential infringements by other states of its sovereign rights,” lawyers for the country said in a support brief that was released late Tuesday. “Foreign courts are obliged to respect Irish sovereignty,” they added.
The efforts by Ireland, which is home to the operations of large American technology companies including Google and Facebook, are the latest in a number of appeals by companies and civil liberty organizations against the United States government’s efforts to obtain emails stored in the Irish data center.
This month, organizations including Amazon, Apple, CNN, Fox News, Verizon, The Washington Post, and almost two dozen other technology and media companies also filed briefs in support of the Microsoft case, which is now being considered in New York by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The tech companies said that a ruling against Microsoft could harm their own international operations, as customers could become suspicious that their data would be easily accessible to the United States government. Like other American companies, Microsoft uses data centers around the world for cloud computing services like email and data storage.
News organizations have also warned that foreign governments could use the case to try to gain access to data centers outside their jurisdictions to obtain emails and other information from American journalists.
And in a separate legal brief filed to the court in support of Microsoft, Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the European Parliament from Germany who has called for tough privacy rules in the 28-country European Union, said that the ability of the United States to have unfettered access to data held in Europe would undermine the region’s strict data protection laws.
“European citizens are highly sensitive to the differences between European and U.S. standards on data protection,” Mr. Albrecht said in his brief.
He added, “The successful execution of the warrant at issue in this case would extend the scope of this anxiety to a sizable majority of the data held in the world’s data centers outside the U.S.”