On Wed, 2016-10-05 at 02:26 +0000, jim bell wrote:
>> Generally speaking, American Federal laws are not applicable outside
>> the United States (and its territories) unless the law explicitly says
>> so. The term is called "extraterritorial jurisdiction"
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritorial_jurisdiction I am
>> not aware of anything that would prohibit a person in one of these
>> companies to visit Canada, or Mexico, or perhaps even a foreign
>> embassy, or some other nation, and then publicly announcing the
>> existence of this secret surveillance, immune from the reach of the
>> law.
>The problem is that the company's operations in the US will remain under
>US jurisdiction, and that is the most likely avenue of
>enforcement--against the company, not the individuals leaking the info
>from the shores of Vancouver or Cancún.
Well, then the government would have to argue that the corporation violated the court order somewhere within America, as opposed to an individual outside the jurisdiction of that court. The thing could go as far as the company hiring a foreign attorney, communicating with him by Internet (or courier, etc), with the foreign attorney announcing the fact of the information. It would be very difficult to formulate a theory that a company isn't entitled to communicate with an attorney who was outside the jurisdiction of the U.S., or that the U.S. just happened to have legal power to prevent that attorney from speaking. It would be quickly seen as a First Amendment issue, and would fail.