My Data in the US or EU Cloud

I was sitting in a pub last night drinking a beer and organizing my home photos so I could share with my ex-wife.

I was uploading images in various zipped folders into different buckets in my Amazon S3 storage in the cloud.

I was also uploading various zipped folders from my web application development businesss I ran for 8 years. All the project, accounting and business information for all that time.

While this was going on I was ready a document from the Center for Strategic and International Studies called Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency. Geeky I know. It is a good read though.

I am reading about the legal challenges facing us operating in the cloud. It is huge, a big game changer.

So as I am creating buckets my Amazon S3 Firefox Add-on S3 Fox asks me "Place this Bucket in Europe". Just like that I can put data in the US or in Europe. How does that affect my data, privacy, security, and laws?

Say I was doing something illegal with all this data, what protections do I have. Or how vulnerable am I now?

Would I be better off putting my data in the US Cloud or the European Cloud?

Lots of questions to be answered in the future.