Microsoft's fight against the US position that it may search its overseas servers with a valid US warrant is getting nasty.

Microsoft, which is fighting a US warrant that it hand over e-mail to the US from its Ireland servers, wants the Obama administration to ponder a scenario where the "shoe is on the other foot."

"Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany," Microsoft said. "They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter's box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei."

A Charlotte, North Carolina, judge has single-handedly sparked the release of surveillance applications involving the use of secretive cell-site simulators known as stingrays. To date, it's the most substantial set of surveillance applications—specifically "trap and trace device" orders, a cousin of the "pen register"—to become available.

Senior Resident Judge Richard Boner told Ars on Monday that he’s no privacy absolutist, and he shouldn't get credit. The way Boner sees it, he simply signed off on a common sense compromise between journalists and police.

"The Charlotte Observer has been pursuing this, and I met them two weeks ago with the editors and the reporters," Boner said. "They asked how they would be able to see the orders that had been entered and I said, 'file a motion and I will get police and district attorney to have their say and see if they had any objection for keeping them sealed.' As it turned out, the attorney for the Observer got together with the police attorney and they reached an agreement, so the records for cases that are now closed could be released and would not jeopardize prosecution. They agreed on the form—it wasn't necessarily a matter of me ordering to release the records."

Security through obscurity

While stingrays do target specific phones, they also sweep up cell data of innocents near by who have no idea that such collection is taking place. Authorities have been notoriously tight-lipped about how such devices are acquired and implemented. Former federal magistrate judge Brian Owsley (now a law professor at Indiana Tech) has been unsuccessful in his efforts to unseal similar orders despite familiarity with the legal system. And just last week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case even dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used.