Really? Isn't data you give to a 3rd party their data, so they can give it away without penalty? With colo you can have monitoring and pick a friendly jurisdiction. (Market opportunity for a full featured Office 365 competitor that operates entirely in say, Switzerland, Iceland (?) or maybe Russia for a certain demographic.
Absolutely not. If that were true, the 4chan guy would have been in jail for possession of illegal material posted there.
In the US, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and Stored Communications Act provide protections here... In the event of a civil or criminal litigation, a subpoena delivered to Microsoft will be redirected to the customer or customer's counsel to respond to or quash. If the customer is non-responsive, Microsoft may be compelled to produce data.
There are situations where a criminal investigation will result in a search warrant directed at an individual or organization. Search warrants are a different ballgame... The standards are higher and the cops show up and take everything. Keep in mind in that situation, the cloud has no impact in terms of data privacy -- the police will literally knock down your door or pry the colo cage open to seize what they after.
If the nature of your business requires additional layers of secrecy or offshore servers in Iceland, you should not be using email.
