Not sure what you mean by this.
As a European I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea of a foreign government being able to snoop on my internet communications and I'm hoping European leaders take a stand on this. I don't see that leading any where bad though.
I can't see why any governments would be happy with the US monitoring their citizens communication. If the US laws don't change I'd imagine you will find a lot of alternative services having to appear pretty quickly.
Yes, they will have to look after it. No, it won't be cheap. But in terms of intelligence gathering, it has the potential to significantly impact the US' ease of access to huge bodies of information by cutting North America out of the heart of the internet.
It may be worth reminding people that if the US currently seems to be heading into a police state, that Russia within living memory has manifested one.
I'm all for holding the US accountable, but let's not collectively be idiots and think that this is all uniquely a US problem, and that therefore we can just stop worrying about everywhere else in the world and let them do whatever because they aren't the US, they must be awesome. We're still criticizing the US for heading in a direction that quite a few other major countries have already arrived at. It's great criticism, it's legitimate concerns, but don't get overexcited and give everybody else a pass.
Can anyone say with a straight face that Russia won't sniff Internet traffic with the same basic purposes and approaches, either now or anytime in, say, the next ten years? I sure wouldn't bet any money on that claim.
- If the US becomes a totalitarian regime, then all of your data can be used to imprison you for political transgressions. If you live in the US, but your data is in Russia, the Russians aren't going to care about your political transgressions (e.g. calling for a protest) against the US government.
- If your data is in a different country than where you are physically located, then there is less of a chance of your local machine being compromised. For example, Russia is going to be less likely to send an agent to the US to bug a computer (e.g. hardware keylogger) unless you are a really high-value target.
However, spreading it around is at least somewhat better than having the majority of traffic snooped on by a single power. Right?