Interesting article on Reuters.
U.S. judge rules search warrants extend to overseas email accounts.
A summary of the effects of that are covered in that article as well as getting a mention on the UK register site.
Basically all those governments that insist any data stored on cloud servers is stored locally in in-country data centres to keep it out of the hands of the NSA or any other US government agency may be out of luck.
A US judge has ruled that it does not matter what country the data is stored in; if it is in a cloud data centre owned by a US company then the US can demand the US based company hand over that data stored in another country… apparently any privacy laws in the country the data is stored in are irrelevant to the US.
Microsoft are appealing the ruling, good on them. Of course that is self-interest, if the ruling stands no company or government in the world will use any US company as a cloud hosting service.
