> With the US law that the US government should be able to get access to any data held by a US company
Er, what law is this, exactly?
> With the US law that the US government should be able to get access to any data held by a US company
Er, what law is this, exactly?
CLOUD Act and FISA §702
CLOUD Act.
it is not easy with a quick search to ascertain the subtleties of the CLOUD Act.
the example case on wikipedia entails a US citizen storing data with Microsoft, a US company, data that Microsoft offshored from the US. So in that case, the US Courts and politicians seem on pretty firm ground to consider that data to be "obtainable" by court order; it wouldn't make sense for American vendors to to create a privacy "double Dutch sandwich" as is done with corporate income tax loopholes. Letting the law go that far would not be a threat to "Europe".
Now if Europeans were committing crimes in the US without being in the US themselves (let's say organized crime trafficking to the US or operating phone scams) that raises more interesting questions about jurisdictions, but that discussion is only productive with good knowledge of what US-European cooperation is already in place or considered "within the pale" due to shared mutual concerns
According to wikpedia, "the CLOUD Act asserts that U.S. data and communication companies must provide stored data for a customer or subscriber on any server they own and operate when requested by warrant, but provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."
It could "scare" Europeans to read that, but an important keyword is "requested by a warrant": to be scared by it, you'd need to know that US Courts are issuing warrants for Europeans who are not committing crimes in the US, which I doubt. Europeans committing crimes I already touched on.
wikipedia continues, It also provides an alternative and expedited route to MLATs through "executive agreements"; the executive branch is given the ability to enter into bi-lateral agreements with foreign countries to provide requested data related to its citizens in a streamlined manner, as long as the Attorney General, with concurrence of the Secretary of State, agree that the foreign country has sufficient protections in place to restrict access to data related to United States citizens.[8][9] The first such agreement was with the United Kingdom.[10] There is a FAQ appended to the white paper published by the U.S. Department of Justice.
This aspect of the CLOUD act should not specifically scare Europeans, they should rather be scared of their own governments cooperating in such schemes. For Europeans to want the US not to have the CLOUD act to protect them from their own governments is rational, but not something that can be discussed, it would melt European brains to say anything positive about the US.
wikipedia goes into more interesting areas for US/Euro conflict (for example, who would be covered by the GDPR for the information that the CLOUD act covers) which is interesting but I'm less equipped to discuss that than the preceding. here is the link you can chase down if you want https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act#International_reacti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act#International_reacti...