That’s just the LEGAL way to get at it. There’s very little stopping the illegal ones as well.
Thanks to the Patriot Act, US spooks no longer have to waste their time having to crack into European company servers to steal their secrets. They can show up in Redmond with a court order. The company in question would never know that the US government is spying on them.
Microsoft has admitted to Zdnet that this is a bit of a problem for its newly released cloud based plans
Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK said that regardless of where cloud data was in the world, Vole had to hand over information to the spooks.
Frazer explained that, as Microsoft is a U.S.-headquartered company, it has to comply with the United States, as well as any other location where one of its subsidiary companies is based.
He said that “customers would be informed wherever possible”, but unfortunately he can’t guarantee that, as the spooks are almost certain to ask for a gagging order.
To be fair to Vole, the same problem applies to Google, Oracle, Apple, Amazon or HP based cloud services.