The NSA couldn’t really work in the US before this, but they were free and encouraged to work in foreign countries. You should look up how the “five eyes” actually worked, and ECHELON before it: Your data stored overseas is fair game for the NSA. Inside the country they needed a secret warrant to nab it.
They collected everything from the US but pretended they could only search comms with at least one non-US party without a warrant (there were no technical barriers to this and Snowden even claimed it would be easy for a low level NSA agent to read the President’s emails). Foreigners may be easier to search without a warrant at the NSA, but using services outside the US gives a greater chance your data isn’t in their database to begin with.
I guess the policy of the Company I work for, that we don’t use any service hosted in the USA, is sticking around then.
The NSA couldn’t really work in the US before this, but they were free and encouraged to work in foreign countries. You should look up how the “five eyes” actually worked, and ECHELON before it: Your data stored overseas is fair game for the NSA. Inside the country they needed a secret warrant to nab it.
They collected everything from the US but pretended they could only search comms with at least one non-US party without a warrant (there were no technical barriers to this and Snowden even claimed it would be easy for a low level NSA agent to read the President’s emails). Foreigners may be easier to search without a warrant at the NSA, but using services outside the US gives a greater chance your data isn’t in their database to begin with.