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Comment by perpetuallunch | Hacker News Reader

That’s not going to help anyone.

The Five Eyes is an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are party to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

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Even being stored in EU doesn't preclude your data from being targeted by signals intelligence. Which is different than requiring US based companies to provide non-US data to American government.

Does fastmail have a US presence? If no - then they're not bound at all by US jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, in realPolitik, they are Australian, they are subject to AU government pressure, and the AU government is deeply intertwined with and compliant to US government wishes, AUKUS, Pine Gap, Harold Holt Sub communications, Over the horizon radar on China, etc.

See: https://roncobb.net/img/cartoons/aus/k5092-on-Tucker_Box-cuu...

> Does fastmail have a US presence? If no - then they're not bound at all by US jurisdiction.

This hasn't been true for several years. All Australian companies (and UK companies) are under jurisdiction of the US Cloud Act. Just the same as American companies are.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...

No, it would be a different act in each country.

They didn't even manage to extradite Kim Dotcom for years.

Kim dotcom was extradited from New Zealand, not Australia. They're different places.

They're both Five Eyes

Sure, but the point was that the US doesn't even need to exercise their capabilities under the five eyes treaty. They have a separate Cloud act agreement with Australia already which is a more direct route to get what they want.

The question isn’t whether a service has a presence in the sense of employees or regional office, or headquarters.

The question is: do they office services to residents of said country / state.

If so they may well be subject to certain laws that, if broken, could result in penalties up to an including extradition of the responsible officers.

As an Australian, all I can say is stop being naive.

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