Comment: 1.5%?! What about everyone outside the US? (Score 2) 457
There are a lot more than 1.5% of us who didn't vote for the US government, starting with almost everyone outside the US, who the US Powers That Be don't much seem to care about alienating this week even if we're all "allies". This whole mess is exposing the fundamental problems of international legal frameworks when it comes to commercial and intelligence practice.
For example, it's now going to be very awkward for US businesses that deal with lots of personal information about people from Europe -- where data protection laws are much stronger than in the US -- to explain how they are both complying with those laws and complying with the US government harvesting data. Plenty of people have noticed the paradox in the past and turned a blind eye or left it to the EU bureaucrats to figure out how to deal with it quietly, but somehow I doubt that's going to fly for much longer at this point.
Things are about to get very awkward for any EU companies that send data over to US services covered by the Safe Harbor rules as well, because if it's clear that Safe Harbor doesn't really protect data to European standards because the US government freely admits it can get to it anyway, then almost by definition it's going to become illegal to use all those US-based services from the EU. If that actually became a real thing, the economic consequences would be... unpleasant.