It talks about recent discussions in the Netherlands where it was suggested that US based cloud firms be banned from competing for Government contracts.

It is interesting in that it points out that the US Government has not so far said that it won’t pry. The Obama administration recently signed trade agreements with a number of Pacific Rim nations and managed to get them to ease their requirements for local data-centres but how that was accomplished is not revealed. There seems to be a lot of talk about everything being really cool and telling people to not overly worry but there seems to be no concrete guarantee that the PATRIOT Act won’t be used…

That’s not to say that it doesn’t work both ways, US government contracts have been known to restrict the location of data-centres.

This seems a rather dangerous game though as it can’t help but encourage other nations to raise their own trade-barriers.

It’s still unlikely that authorities within the US would go to the time and effort of breaking your encryption in order to access your data rather than using other nefarious, cheaper, means to gain access but it’d be still nice to have some guarantee… something to anchor the cloud if you will.