Imagine if the government had private data in the cloud and somebody accessed it. Do you think that person would be able to say in court, "The government doesn't own its cloud data, so I accessed it."?
Well, as much as I think their position on this is complete bullshit and a slap in the face of freedom, they aren't committing crime to get at it, they are either asking nicely or have some form of warrant. Presumably, one would be committing a crime to get at theirs.
But it could be argued if the entity "asking nicely" is the government, then that counts as coercion. While not technically illegal, it could be an abuse of power.
Handing out data after requests is not an abuse of power, that's a failure of the data storage facility to do a bare minimum attempt to protect their users' rights. I say this because the actual abuse of power is secret Patriot Act warrants. When the government wants data, they don't use some sort of Mafia-style coercion, they just make it illegal to not give them the data.
