I personally think that you reap what you sow.
Who’s doing the reaping here? Microsoft, its customers, or the Feds?
Those companies seem to be very adept at dodging taxes by moving their money around internationally between companies that they control.
So I expect they will come up with a similar legalistic ruse to get around being held to account for holding data.
I predict that lawyers will get rich over this.
So if a warrant allows the cops to search a specific place in the US for a specific thing, this should not work. However, if a subpena requires a person to bring information in to court as evidence, regardless of where the person had the information stored, why didn’t they just issue a subpena?
This sort of thing is one reason why I expect cloud-computing businesses to move to technical implementations that enable them to (truthfully) tell the government “I’d love to help you with that, but it’s simply not possible. You’ll have to go to the client – he can access the data; we can’t.”
It’s mostly going to be driven by global competitiveness – in the wake of the Snowden revelations, “Made/Operated in USA” has become a warning label for any type of communications technology – but these legal complications will accelerate the process.
Yeah, our cloud servers are in Europe and I’m starting to use that as a selling point. Not that it will necessarily do anybody any good, but I toss it out there and let people do their own mental calculations.
Would you like us to move this to The BBQ Pit? Or would you like to actually propose a debate?
[ /Moderating ]