Microsoft is expected to testify that outdated U.S. laws and agreements between countries on cross-border data transfer must be amended as tech companies are increasingly ‘whipsawed’ in legal conflicts in which local authorities seek warrants over data stored in the cloud.

In testimony ahead of a U.S. House of Representatives hearing scheduled for Thursday, Microsoft’s President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith wrote that countries are “increasingly claiming new extraterritorial legal authority (and interpreting existing legal authorities) to access and intercept data.” In response, other countries are enacting a range of laws, including data localization and data retention requirements, to counter such extraterritorial authorities, he added.

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