The Day the Lawyer Called: A Discovery Request We Couldn’t Refuse
When foreign courts demand Citizen data, your vendor's 'compliance' becomes your liability. Here is how we survive the breach of sovereignty.
A Subpoena is a Breach of Borders
The email subject line was innocuous: “Notice of Legal Process regarding Account #4492.”
It was not a request from our local police. It was a forwarded subpoena from a court in Northern California, demanding metadata on three years of municipal social work cases. The vendor, a large SaaS provider we rely on for case management, had already prepared the file. They were notifying us as a “courtesy” 24 hours before transmission.
I called the vendor’s policy lead. “This data belongs to the Municipality,” I said, keeping my voice level. “It is protected by local statute. You have no right to export it.”
“We are subject to US law,” the voice on the phone replied, sounding bored. “We have to comply with the Stored Communications Act. We recommend you retain US counsel if you wish to intervene.”
I hung up. We had not been hacked by a criminal; we had been annexed by a foreign judiciary.
The Threat: The Citizen as Collateral Damage
We operate under a delusion that our laws act as a forcefield. We believe that because we are public servants protecting vulnerable Citizens, foreign powers will respect our boundaries.
This is naive. To a foreign hyperscaler, our “Citizen” is merely a “User,” and our “sovereign records” are merely “rows in a database.” When a foreign entity—be it a court or an intelligence agency—demands access, the vendor faces a binary choice: betray the customer or defy their own government.
They will always choose their government.
This creates a vector of risk where the Public’s private life is exposed to legal proceedings that have nothing to do with them. A divorce case in Texas could theoretically subpoena travel data from a transit authority in Oslo if the software vendor is common to both.
The Treaty: Architecture as Defense
Since that day, we have changed how we draft our treaties (contracts). We no longer accept “standard legal process” clauses. We demand Technical Sovereignty.
If a vendor cannot legally refuse a subpoena, we must ensure they technically cannot comply with it.
- Blind Storage: The vendor stores the data, but they cannot see it. We encrypt the fields before they leave our network. If a subpoena arrives, the vendor can only hand over unintelligible static.
- The Warrant Canary: We require a contractual clause stating the vendor must notify us of any request before processing it, unless legally prohibited. If they are gagged, we monitor for “warrant canaries”—subtle signals that trust has been compromised.
- Jurisdictional Segregation: We no longer mix data. Citizen data stays on infrastructure owned by entities with no US nexus.
We defended our Citizen’s privacy that week, but only by threatening to cancel a seven-figure contract publicly. It was a diplomatic skirmish we should never have had to fight.
FAQs
Can't we just ignore a foreign court order?
We can. The vendor cannot. If the vendor wishes to continue doing business in their home country, they must comply. They will sacrifice our data to save their license.
Does this happen often?
More often than is reported. Most vendors are gagged from telling you until after the data is gone.
Is this solved by hosting in a local data center?
No. If the vendor is foreign-owned, the data center location is irrelevant to their home courts.