That's simple: the US executives go to jail for obstruction of justice. It was their choice to set things up that way, and store their emails offshore with the intent of obstructing justice.

Well most of your liberal buddies voted for him. He certainly wasn't elected by conservatives. Not every single conservative voted for Bush either, but they still collectively bear the blame for his disastrous tenure.

Software? From China? You're kidding, right?

Yes, I'm fairly dim and even I predicted this would happen.

Touche!

The engineering work (mainly software) is still all done in the US. For whatever reasons, other countries simply haven't developed so much expertise with software as Silicon Valley has.

Yes, I believe this is the exact point I'm trying to make. When the people in power have YOU, they don't need cooperation from foreign governments. You comply with their wishes, or else.

Yes, but the US does have the ability to make life miserable for YOU when you're on US soil. They don't need the Swiss government to help; they just have to "convince" you to give them the money voluntarily. Enter your PIN number here to transfer the money, or else.... Don't bother arguing legalities; the only thing that matters is power. Seizing cash because it's laced with cocaine isn't legal either (4th Amendment), but that doesn't stop them.

The DoI is not a legal document, and has zero legal weight. The Southern states tried something like what you suggest and it didn't turn out well for them. I do believe it's possible the US might break apart eventually, but due to the whole "united we stand, divided we fall" mentality plus the principles established by Lincoln concerning secession, the only way it'll happen is when things are SO bad the Federal government is simply powerless to prevent the states from leaving.

Then maybe you should do a better job voting. You liberals voted for Obama, and he's now your figurehead, and he flatly disagrees with you; he thinks the government IS entitled to all the irrelevant data it wants. Most other liberal politicians agree with Obama, and they make the laws. Good job.

There's a bit of a fallacy in that comment -- we have no proof that Iceland wouldn't be just as bad if they had the opportunity. If Iceland had the same vendor presence internationally that the US and China do, there's a fairly good chance that sooner or later someone would come into power who feels a need to abuse their position.

I'm pretty sure this is itself a fallacy. You can't just assume every country operates identically, given the same opportunity. That's just like saying every man would rape a woman given a good opportunity, just because one guy did so.

Iceland hasn't done anything to earn a bad reputation. The US government has.

What will (and in a lot of places has started to) happen is that all of the countries will just turn inwards and shut out everyone.

No, they'll erect better fences between themselves and stop sharing data they don't need to, which is a good thing. Data shouldn't be passed through untrustworthy countries. More backbones being built (as you cite with Canada) means more routes for data to move around in case some countries become bad actors. It's better that people/countries become more self-sufficient. This doesn't mean that all cross-border communications are going to cease. If I send an email from Canada to my friend in the US, that email needs to cross US backbones, and it's OK that US authorities can read it (if that's the law there, as the People there have voted for by electing pro-spying politicians). However, if I send an email from Canada to Iceland, it's not OK for US authorities to read that, so it's better if Canada has a link directly to Iceland (or at least the EU at large), without that traffic having to pass through the US first.

Exactly. You can't assume every government is going to behave justly at all times. Some governments are just plain bad. Do business with companies in those countries at your peril.

The problem with your assumption is that we're not talking about an overseas branch with some lackeys here. The upper management in this case is located in and resides in the country which is demanding the data.

If the upper management is found to have told the foreigners to obstruct justice, there's hefty penalties for that.

This is all very interesting, but it's completely tangential to the discussion at hand.

You are the idiot. Again, for the idiot that you are: USA went on a fishing expedition, issuing blanket demands to banks that operate to give up customer information (customers, that are not even account holders in USA branches of the targeted banks), trying to force foreign banks on foreign soil to give up account information on all USA citizens that have accounts in those banks. No court order for any specific crime, nothing, simply a demand to give up all data. Similar to NSA recording all phone calls (including that of all USA citizens) without any court order whatsoever. The difference is of-course that companies based in other countries with accounts opened in other countries are not subject to any USA demands and if companies complied with anything, they are suffering for it now domestically (loss of trust among the account holders and public in general), which is why foreign banks don't even want to accept new Americans as customers.