A federal appeals court ruling has made it more difficult for the DOJ to obtain electronic content stored overseas, creating implications for an array of government investigations. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Microsoft that a request to produce customer content it stored in Ireland was beyond the scope of the Stored Communications Act. “It’s an extremely significant decision [that the Act] does not authorize a U.S. district court to issue a search warrant to seize data being held by ISPs or remote computing services (cloud services) outside the territorial U.S.,” Edward McAndrew, a partner at Ballard Spahr, told the Anti-Corruption Report. “It is the first ruling of its kind on that issue from the U.S. Court of Appeals. See “Foreign Attorneys Share Insight on Data Privacy and Privilege in Multinational Investigations” (Jun. 28, 2016)