@Oh Homer ... Re: So basically...
Actually it is. And its true for any other Western Government.
But in reality, I think that this case the US will fail. While Microsoft is a US based company, the data is on non-US citizens and the data is stored outside of the US. So there's no legal right for the US to gain access to this data as long as its never accessed from within the US.
And its a potential threat. There was at one time a practice where an account would be set up and bad actors would edit a draft document instead of actually sending it. (I intentionally forgot the specifics.) The point is that if the bad actors are sitting in France and Turkey and the data is sitting in Ireland, neither the French, US, or pretty much most of the western world would have a legal right to get the data. It may become gray in France, Turkey and Ireland, but you get the idea.
IANAL and I don't know the UK Laws or the EU's laws. But in this case... the US Government will have to get very creative and Microsoft will most likely prevail.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
