Honest question: would it matter if they stored data in mainland china? Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov? (Not that i really believe that any data in china is safe from gov, although i could say the same about usa, but what is the actual bar that the us gov has to meet to show its a national security risk? Is data on china soil sufficient?)
American companies have a legal system to protect them against unlawful requests. That rule of law is under attack, but exists, which does not seem to be the case for China.
Unfortunately the FISA courts have been abused like crazy. But warrants aren't just paperwork. If you're charged with a crime but the prosecution has violated your rights, you can walk free in the U.S. You have multiple layers of appeals courts to go through if you get railroaded. The CCP is truly authoritarian and rules and laws are what they say they are. Not even remotely equivalent.
Snowden revealed a FISA warrant that granted access to data on all Verizon calls. At the point that courts are granting such broad (and blatantly unconstitutional) warrants, warrants don't matter any more.
We're trying to roll that back apparently. I don't have a lot of hope but we'll see. These politicians are all basically under fire this november so they better damnwell hustle.
Also, FWIW, companies can release FISA statements saying they've been accessed. How much of that is actually true depends on your level of paranoia.
The unique part of Chinese law is the lack of judicial supremacy or "rule of law". The party has supremacy over legal system interpretation as part of the '3 Supremes' order of precedence, with workers also coming ahead of the law.
In the US system, there are still miscarriages of Justice, but there is judicial supremacy and separation of powers.
The powers aren't as separated as say the French justice system, but most would say the US judicial system is mostly independent of the other branches of government.
If there is only one party permitted, and that one party is supreme, then how is that a party? It looks like government to me. Maybe the translation to English is just wrong. The "party" isn't a party by any reasonable definition.
The real parties would be factions within the so-called party. I don't know if they have names more descriptive than "Xi supporters" and "Xi opponents".
We trust them to answer to SCOTUS, who we in turn trust to interpret the constitution that a majority of us have agreed to keep. Basically a group of people whose entire job is to interpret the actions in terms of law, constitution, and human rights - a marrying of theories on social contract, natural rights, and separation of powers that we've seen emulated (and improved upon) across the free world :)
Overall, I particularly enjoy this system over one that is accountable to a single entity.
> Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov?
Hard to say if it's even enough to keep it outside of China. As long as the company is under Chinese jurisdiction, they'll have a hard time saying "no, sorry, that data center is in Singapore, we won't comply".
The EU has similar issues with the US cloud providers: even if an Amazon data center is in the EU, obviously they will hand over data if a US court order/NSL tells them to. One way that Microsoft tried to mitigate that was to have a data trustee run the data centers with Microsoft not having access, therefore not being able to give anything to the government. They've stopped offering it after a few years though.
You need to read the laws in China where they require any chinese company or individual to hand over data to the chinese government on request, no exception, no lawsuit, period.
