The Worst Threats to Data Security ...

... come from governments.

Especially the US government:

[A] federal judge today ordered Twitter to turn over private information related to the accounts of three of its users as part of the ongoing WikiLeaks probe.

No warrant, no cited probable cause, just a fishing expedition versus an Icelandic MP, a Dutch volunteer, and an American programmer.

Organizations which collected private/sensitive information on their customers owe it to those customers -- and to themselves -- to offshore their servers and, as much as possible, their entire operations, in more privacy-friendly states.

Or, if possible, to engineer things such that they don't have access to most of that data themselves, and therefore can't be pressured into turning it over.

Orwell's INGSOC operatives were pikers compared to today's nation-states. All the Thought Police had were omnipresent telescreens and audio bugs. In the real world, a great deal of our information is almost automatically stored in structures that make surveilling us much easier than Orwell ever imagined. Living in the US today is like living in Bentham's Panopticon.