MLAT is slower, but in combination with ECPA, requires a U.S. judge to sign off on an order to obtain data within the U.S., and other countries get the chance t

MLAT is slower, but in combination with ECPA, requires a U.S. judge to sign off on an order to obtain data within the U.S., and other countries get the chance to run U.S. requests through their domestic judicial process too. The CLOUD Act would bypass that to allow the entire request process to run through the executive of each country, removing judicial review. What the CLOUD Act has is a set of promises, and no oversight. What we have right now is oversight, which is slow because it's insufficiently funded. You can speed up the MLAT process, an internationally agreed standard that protects local processes. You can't see inside the CLOUD Act to see whether its processes are working. (To give an example of this: we still don't know the other half of the CLOUD Act, which is the UK/US draft agreement on data-sharing. A lot of the promises of privacy and security rely on what this says. Why can't Congress, Parliament, and the British and American public see this before making a decision to switch? Maybe we can see that proposal, and then wait to see what the SCOTUS actually decides in the Microsoft Ireland case, before throwing out the entire current system?