Part of the reason that people from around the world are keen to put their money into US property, and thus to contribute significantly to the wealth of the US,

Part of the reason that people from around the world are keen to put their money into US property, and thus to contribute significantly to the wealth of the US, is because they justifiably believe that their US property rights have some real and effective protection based in law, not just the good intentions of the US government. When they figure out that their US cloud data has no similar protection, it's likely to have adverse consequences for the US over time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853380 (The situation with "upstream collection" of data passing though US telcos is less clear-cut, and in any case there's SSL for that - it's the PRISM "direct collection" which most demands attention.)