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by crazygringo 153 days ago
It seems like the entire point is precisely to get around the CLOUD Act.

By setting it up with a European governance structure, Amazon can tell the US government "hey we told them give us the data, but they refused because that would send them to jail under EU law, and they're a legally separate entity so there's nothing we can do."

This is very intentionally not just a regular foreign subsidiary owned by the parent company.
1 comments
timeon 153 days ago
> so there's nothing we can do

And US law will just let it go?

There are several options for AWS. They can simply just obfuscate command to local employees. Or fly US employees there just for this one task. "EU law" will find out after they are back in US - if ever. There is no way to escape CLOUD Act if it is US owned.

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crazygringo 153 days ago
"Obfuscating commands" isn't a thing. EU employees know if they are retrieving data or not. And they don't blindly run commands like they're dummies or something.

And if they fly American employees over, what makes you think they'd be let in the building, or under what credentials do you think they'd be accessing the system? Legally speaking, those Americans are simply from a partner company. Just because you're doing business with a partner company doesn't mean you let them into your building.

The point is that AWS is intentionally making it so they don't have options.

So yes, US law lets it go. The law is limited in terms of what it can affect outside US borders. If the EU doesn't want to cooperate, and the US isn't willing to engage in sanctions or war against the EU, then yeah the US is out of options.

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meeshmuesh 149 days ago
It will use the same software infrastructure and physical hardware that’s used in the rest of AWS. Hooped confident are you that he partitions are resilient enough ?

Can engineers be dual eu/us citizens ? AWS uses a lot of ex military and US citizens with government clearance levels for their US govcloud. I don’t see an equivalent here

Amazon can promise the moon and the sky but if I wanted digital sovereignty within the eu it would not be with Amazon any more than I would trust tencent

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bee_rider 153 days ago
There must already be protocols in place that prevent any random Amazon employee from getting access to sensitive data (like, the folks in the warehouses can’t just walk in to the AWS datacenters, I assume).

That’s who those US employees would be, from the point of view of the EU branch… no reason to assume they’d let them in. Flying people over to do crimes seems like a risky idea.

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