The Patriot Act, Microsoft and Cloud Computing: A International Debate
Europeans haven’t always looked kindly at the USA PATRIOT Act since Congress approved it shortly after the 2011 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Now, members of European parliamentary states are taking a long look at changing European Union law to prevent personal data from European Union citizens and companies to end up with U.S. government officials.
The chief of Microsoft UK said last week that Microsoft can’t prevent U.S. officials from retrieving data from European-based cloud computing services if these officials file a request under the PATRIOT Act. According to a featured post on the ZDNet Web site, no other European country can do this, either.
This has led to much consternation on the part of European Union leaders. Microsoft’s admission reported by the ZDNet Web site makes it clear that cloud computing data is not truly protected under European Union law. It will now be interesting to see what steps, if any, European Union leaders take to bolster their own laws to provide more protection for their citizen’s data.
Some analysts predict that European Union officials will somehow equip their data-protection laws with more teeth. If they do, they might be able to prevent data from leaving their countries and ending up in the hands of government officials in the United States, even if U.S. officials invoke the PATRIOT Act in requesting this information.
A related story on the ComputerWorld Web site quotes legal experts who say that the European Union’s data-protection legislation isn’t “worth the paper it’s written on.”
This, of course, makes a bit of a mockery of the European Union’s order that companies such as Google, Facebook and others follow the union’s rather strict privacy rules when it comes to data, even that data found in the world of cloud computing.
As technology changes, new legal questions continually arise. This latest legal skirmish, though, promises to be particularly fascinating. The USA PATRIOT Act has been a source of controvery since its adoption. And this controversy hasn’t only raged in foreign lands; plenty of U.S. residents and analysts have their own concerns about this legislation.
It’s only fitting, then, that the act has become the source of a new international debate focusing on that newest fad of computer users, cloud services.
