On 30th March, Paul Hastings published a briefing on this US Act which President Trump signed into law on March 23rd, as part of a broader spending Bill. It enacted crucial statutory changes affecting law enforcement access to data stored by online service providers. The Act aims to resolve conflicts between US authorities and service providers arising from law enforcement requests to obtain data that is stored abroad. A number of service providers took the position that law enforcement requests only applied to data stored on servers located within the US and not abroad, even though the provider had the capacity to access the data and full remote control of the data. One thing pointed out is that the Act allows certain foreign governments to directly serve legal process requests on US providers without any intermediary requests to the DoJ or involvement of US courts. Prior to the CLOUD Act, when governments attempted to obtain evidence stored in another country, they often had to work through slow and cumbersome mutual legal assistance treaties (MLAT) and were required to ask the DoJ to obtain a court order for that information.
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