NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court in New York won't rehear a panel's decision letting companies like Microsoft refuse to turn over to the government customer emails stored overseas.
The judges of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split their votes 4-4. The decision was announced Tuesday.
A three-judge panel last July said prosecutors cannot force corporations to release customers' emails and other data stored on servers overseas.
Last summer's ruling was a victory for high-tech companies in the cloud computing business. Microsoft stores data from over 1 billion customers and over 20 million businesses on servers in over 40 countries.
Prosecutors had sought information in 2013 from an email account stored in Dublin, Ireland, saying they thought it was being used in narcotics trafficking.
