US Law is designed primarily to penetrate privacy; protection of privacy is also mentioned somewhere in the footnotes. But US law probably will not come into play if for instance Maltese law has quietly authorized access to and permanent storage of data. Well I don't know but, I think locally...
And that can get tricky since data usually exists in multiple jurisdictions. We don't know what "the law" is. As disturbing as it sounds, the U.S. has secret laws covering data acquisition. This might be true of other countries as well. Also, it's rare data that never crosses geographical...