A Philadelphia court has made the unfortunate decision to reopen the legal debate on whether the United States has the right to access emails stored on foreign servers if they belong to U.S. companies.
If Magistrate Thomas Rueter's ruling stands, anyone using U.S.-based internet companies will have to live with the knowledge that, as far as the U.S. government is concerned, it's America wherever they operate.
That's a dangerous approach that hurts the international expansion of U.S. tech companies. Privacy-minded customers in Europe are already suspicious of the U.S. government's cooperation with the tech giants, revealed by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. Nationalist politicians in some countries — for example, Marine Le Pen of the French National Front — want to ban cross-border personal data transfers, arguing that such data must be stored on servers inside the internet user's country. That, however, does not appear to guarantee that the U.S. won't get at it, either.