When the Patriot Act was passed, there were a lot of European companies who were very skeptical about DHS/NSA snooping on their data. Now we've got solid proof that it's happening.
Regardless of what the US does now, people have lost faith. They can interpret the definition of words in the law so that what they do (which seem immoral/illegal/wrong to us) is in fact legal.
What the US can't control is purchasing power. Companies outside of the US are looking inwards again. AWS/Rackspace clouds look great, but you're bending yourself and your customers over, and the NSA didn't even buy you dinner.
The US cloud is toast.
It would be irresponsible to trust the cloud anywhere, really, for two reasons. First, you can't know if another government is compliant with U.S. surveillance. Second, you can't expect any other government to be honest about its own actions either.
Sorry I don't have a link to the Gartner report about the current state of adoption I'm referencing.
Enterprises that are providing services to customers will continue using cloud services for their customers, because they'll probably get the NSA shakedowns anyway.
If you are using cloud services for proprietary development, research, and general employee workflow (e.g. Office 365, Google Docs, Gmail, and similar services) then there's a good chance you're making a big mistake.
Good for sys admins, bad for software engineers.
Governments act the way they do because majority of people don't care about any of this stuff, not yet at least. Most people who're uneasy about these revelations are uneasy because of what might happen in the future and they fear how far governments are willing to go (or better yet, can they go any further) to invade our privacy. Today, governments' actions don't effect any of us, not directly at least. It's been the case that people don't act against something unless that thing directly effect their lives.
But maybe it really is too late and the trust can not be restored again. Wealth inequality directly effects the citizens of the US (at least that's how I see it from a foreigners point of view) and the US citizens did nothing to change it, other than OWS movement which was arguably a desperate attempt.
The problem is, that right now US based cloud services loose customers to other competitors which are not hampered by ridiculous US laws. Since cloud services are all about customer lock in, it does not matter if trust can be restored at a later time(which I personally doubt). They have lost the customer to a competitor - most likely forever.
> The problem is, that right now US based cloud services loose customers to other competitors which are not hampered by ridiculous US laws.
I don't think that's the case. Is there even a cloud service that's out of NSA's reach that's become prominent after these revelations? People on HN mentioned some services, but general public still use Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive as if nothing's happened.
The same can be said for U.S. companies, since they are given secret gag orders that they aren't allowed to mention, that also tell the companies what lies to say.
There's no going back. If you care at all about keeping information from your competitors, government, or anyone else who might get their hands on it, you need to host it physically on your own local internal network. No cloud.