Given what I've heard about NSA, they are far more reasonable than our FSB (successor of KGB if anyone doesn't know). Our guys can easily use their right to "take for investigation" some servers just to protect a business of some of their colonels or friend of a colonel. And that makes storing a data in Russia a bit of a lottery.

That's the thing. In the modern secular state you need a Constitution which is essentially a covenant between man and his government, that the government is actually representing will of the people. Without that sort of secular, yet holy, document and corruption you get this sort of cronyism in which a normal honest man does not have rights or the same rights as corrupt people with connections do. This then makes everything more difficult and unpredictable. The Russians and the Soviets before them have never figured this out. We still have problems when this sort of behavior seeps into our system, but we have pretty good ways of controlling this behavior, and a general revulsion of the public against it, helps keep it under control.

New Zealand is rated as the second least corrupt country in the world and ranked fourth on the democracy index, yet it has no constitution.

There is no formal document called the constitution of NZ.

What we have is an "uncodified constitution" which means that while there is no formal constitution there is an informal one made up of a number of laws, treaties (most noticeably the Treaty of Waitangi), precedents, and pretty much habits which give us our sovereignty and rights.

According to Wikipedia the only countries without a constitution are NZ, the UK, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Isreal.

So it seems that it's not important whether or not you have a constitution, what is important is simply how accountable the people hold the government.

An interesting fact, which illustrates the point, is that there are laws which state that Te Reo (Maori) and NZ Sign Language are both official languages of NZ (along with regional languages on some of the other Islands) there is no corresponding law for English, yet most of the country speaks it and all laws are drafted in it (along with Te Reo).

My point was not that you need a written document called a constitution, merely what the document above states:

"A constitution is about public power, the power of the state. It describes and establishes the major institutions of government, states their principal powers, and regulates the exercise of those powers in a broad way. While all constitutions have these general characteristics, each constitution is affected by the national character of the state it services."

In the US it's a written document and it's held sacred by most Americans. But you don't need that, just what is mentioned above which I quoted. In either case it's a covenant with the government which limits the power of the government and protects the rights of people. You need that and you also need a lack of corruption, which in general terms means the government abides by the constitution. If you have these two things than the common man can expect to be treated a certain way by the government regardless of any of his or her affiliations and so on.

Well, I don't understand what your initial point is because every country has a constitution then - including Russia.

The difference between is that in New Zealand the "constitution" is fluid and is very easy to change because it's simply laws.

This is way off topic, but I think holding the constitution as some sort of semi-religious document is actually a bad thing, for instance the right to bear arms is seen by the rest of the world as quite odd and very scary. If people weren't so fervent about the document you can look at it objectively and make the required changes to reflect the times.

Reasonable? It actually makes the NSA's job easier. The major constraint on the NSA is the requirement to at least pay lip service to the idea that they are not spying on US citizens. By neatly separating out foreign data, this law actually helps them. In the US the NSA is constrained; in other countries they can operate with impunity.

Yeah, but they get around that by getting the Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and United Kingdom intelligence agencies to spy on US citizens.

Then you misunderstand the law. It does not prevent companies from storing data abroad, it only requires them to have copy in Russia.

If that's true it would suggest to me it really isn't about privacy but it's about the ability of the Russian government to get at the data. And that makes sense.

> Given NSA's monitoring activities, this is a surprisingly reasonable law.

EU also, as far as I know, talks about it but doesn't seriously attempt to enforce it.