American courts can legally seize data stored in other countries

Digital sovereignty vanished with the 2018 CLOUD Act, which ensures that if an American company holds your data, the U.S. government can see it regardless of where the physical hard drive sits. Before this law, investigators had to navigate a diplomatic maze of treaties that often delayed evidence collection by nearly two years. Now, a standard domestic warrant allows federal agencies to reach into data centers in Dublin or Tokyo in a matter of days.