> Non-citizens with no real ties to the US, and not in the US are different.
But their US property is still protected. If I'm a Russian orthodontist in Minsk and I buy 500 shares of Google, the Fifth Amendment protects me having them expropriated by the US government even if I never go near the States. (IANAL, but I did check this one.) However if I open a Google Mail account then apparently (under current interpretations) I have no similar protections.
I can't say if this apparent discrepancy is actually legally justified, or not. Without even getting into the question of whether it's morally justified, it is going to come as a significant surprise to a lot of people, who have got used to the idea that they're largely protected by the US rule of law when they do business with the US. And one way or the other, it's reasonable to point out that Rackspace's Fourth Amendment-based reassurances seem to be (no doubt accidentally) crucially misleading to many or most of its customers.
But their US property is still protected. If I'm a Russian orthodontist in Minsk and I buy 500 shares of Google, the Fifth Amendment protects me having them expropriated by the US government even if I never go near the States. (IANAL, but I did check this one.) However if I open a Google Mail account then apparently (under current interpretations) I have no similar protections.
I can't say if this apparent discrepancy is actually legally justified, or not. Without even getting into the question of whether it's morally justified, it is going to come as a significant surprise to a lot of people, who have got used to the idea that they're largely protected by the US rule of law when they do business with the US. And one way or the other, it's reasonable to point out that Rackspace's Fourth Amendment-based reassurances seem to be (no doubt accidentally) crucially misleading to many or most of its customers.