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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  2197 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An end-run around the Fourth Amendment is buried in the budget bill

I've been looking at this from a different perspective, recently.

Basically, my company makes a SaaS product. A web-app. We have Canadian customers. Many of them are Canadian government agencies. The Canadian government has new regulations about where Canadian's data can be stored... and that is strictly within Canadian borders.

Which is a weirdly provincial way to look at data and the internet, but physical lines on a map are what makes a government a government, so they want all Canadian data to remain in Canada.

Which means we need to have a complete duplicate of our product, running in Canada, in a Canadian data center. And effectively double our costs, to provide a product to the 90% of the Canadian population that lives within 10 miles of the US border.

Which is stupid, and weird, and totally makes sense. All at the same time.

So their lawyers have been working on the CLOUD Act, and American laws, and are kinda suggesting - at this point - that Canadians cannot do business with ANY American companies... because of the far-reaching implications of the CLOUD Act and other laws.

Your Canadian company has one email back and forth with an American?

Well, if that American is under investigation in America, parts of the CLOUD Act and other surveillance acts now makes ALL OF YOUR COMPANY'S DATA available to the American investigative authorities...

... who have regularly shared foreign corporate secrets with American companies, to help American companies compete against foreign companies.

So... yeah.

America is isolating ourselves from the international market... except we are a big market that foreigners want to do business with... but it could be a double-edged sword... but ... but...

Man.... the law can suck.