PATRIOT Act clouds picture for tech

Cloud computing is a gold mine for the U.S. tech industry, but American firms are encountering resistance from an unexpected enemy overseas: the PATRIOT Act.

The Sept. 11-era law was supposed to help the intelligence community gather data on suspected terrorists. But competitors overseas are using it as a way to discourage foreign countries from signing on with U.S. cloud computing providers like Google and Microsoft: Put your data on a U.S.-based cloud, they warn, and you may just put it in the hands of the U.S. government. “The PATRIOT Act has come to be a kind of label for this set of concerns,” said Ambassador Philip Verveer, U.S. coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy at the State Department. “We think, to some extent, it’s taking advantage of a misperception, and we’d like to clear up that misperception.”