A ZDNet article by Zack Whittaker is headed How one judge single-handedly killed trust in US technology industry

It expands on points made in an earlier ZDNet article to which I referred recently in my own article More on accessibility of data – judicial imperialism, the right to be forgotten, and spies. The subject is the ruling by US District Judge Loretta Preska upholding an earlier ruing ordering Microsoft to hand over documents held only on non-US servers.

One of its subheadings is US to Europe: We’ll take what we want, when we want it. Its thrust can be detected in this paragraph:

So it’s little wonder that with this collective mindset, Preska decided to make the world’s data available to the US government, in spite of foreign nations’ own judicial and legal regimes, supra-national fundamental values, and even public international law.

As I said in my own article, anyone who thinks that this subject is easy is not thinking enough. There ought to be limits on the power of US nationals and corporations to put their data beyond the reach of their own courts and authorities. It is good to know that somebody is keeping an eye on those who would do us harm. All countries spy on each other and on their own citizens. The judges here are deciding what the law is, not creating policy.

You can accept all that, and still find it objectionable that the US thinks it right to trample on the laws, rights and privacy of foreign nationals. The rest of the world would set a threshold well south of that assumed by American courts. As the ZDNet article makes clear, many US citizens increasingly find the position which the US takes viz-a-viz the rest of world to be unacceptable

The ZDNet article’s title emphasises that there are implications affecting commercial relationships and trust of US companies which flow from the conclusion that you cannot safely put data on US servers or otherwise into the hands of entities subject to US law. That, perhaps, is not the concern of judges interpreting the law as they find it. It ought, however, to be the concern of policy-makers and those responsible for US external relations.