The US Patriot Act and cloud computing: trick or treat?

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author: Davey Winder.

There’s a lot to be scared about at this time of the year, not least the shameful lack of creativity displayed by your average ‘trick or treat’ teenager when it comes to outfit choice. Just repeating ‘I want your candy’ over and over while wearing a monster mask is not enough to scare me.  However, it would appear that many enterprises are scared enough of the looming threat of someone in an Uncle Sam mask demanding ‘I want your data’ to either avoid cloud storage altogether or rule out what might otherwise prove to be more economical provider choices. Yes, I’m talking about the Patriot Act, as is a newly published International Data Corporation study. 

In a nutshell, what IDC is saying is that European business fears about the Patriot Act and access it provides to data stored within the cloud are largely misguided. The ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001‘ is thankfully more commonly known as the Patriot Act, and simply put it allows data that is stored by a US company to be susceptible to potential seizure or unwarranted search by US Government agencies…

That data doesn’t have to be physically kept in the US, but rather it’s the fact that the company storing it is a US one that matters. So the data itself can be stored outside of US borders, yet if the parent company storing it (as opposed to any local subsidiary company) is registered and headquartered in the US then the Patriot Act applies and that data can be searched and seized. If you use Gmail then, no matter where you may live and the laws of your land, your messages could be accessed by US law enforcement as Google is a US company…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/cloud-security/4942/us-patriot-act-and-cloud-computing-trick-or-treat