Rebecca Greenfield writes:
If the U.S. wants to get a hold of foreign data in any cloud — American or not — it has legal ways of getting it. The PATRIOT Act, or at least the idea of it, is giving foreign cloud computing firms a competitive advantage over American services, reports Politico’s David Saled Rauf. Foreign competitors warn that putting data on U.S. services like Google or Microsoft will subject that data to the government restrictions on gathering data in America vis-a-vis the Patriot Act. “Put your data on a U.S.-based cloud, they warn, and you may just put it in the hands of the U.S. government,” writes Rauf. But, it’s kind of a moot point: U.S. spy laws are more lenient about foreign data as it is and have no legal barriers to monitoring non-citizen information.
Read more on The Atlantic Wire.