There is that classic joke about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist—an experiment in which two children are put in a room to play. The pessimist enters a room full of toys and sits there wailing disconsolately, saying, “Something is going to break.” The optimist enters a room piled high with horse manure and begins rummaging through it enthusiastically, because, “With all this shit, I know there’s got to be a pony somewhere!”

I have blogged a lot over the last two years on the pending case of United States v. Microsoft, the case on whether Microsoft must comply with a search warrant for foreign-stored e-mails. With oral argument scheduled for next Tuesday, I thought I would add a few final thoughts before we finally get a sense of where the Justices might be.

The Microsoft warrant case in the Supreme Court involves a demand by the U.S. government that Microsoft repatriate content data stored in a data center in Ireland and provide it to DOJ. The case raises a number of deeply interesting and complex issues about law enforcement cooperation; extraterritoriality of Ameican law; commercial matters; data privacy concerns; and implications for reciprocal sovereignity in a digitized world. Along with many far more notable former officials, I joined an amicus brief filed the other day in support of neither party. Here's a copy:

On Oct. 18, the European Commission (EC) released its report on the first annual review of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework, the agreement that ensures privacy protections for cross-border transfers of European data, or data concerning European individuals, to the United States.