Here’s an interesting look at malware hosting in the USA. Twenty of the world’s worst fifty ISPs for malware hosting are based in the US, most of the operators responsible for the malware are based in different countries, over 50% in Russia and Ukraine. The conclusion:

In short, aside from the potentially negative effect of appearing on one of the many blacklists published by independent researchers, U.S. based hosting firms have no incentive whatsoever to clean up their IP space. I should hasten to note that The Planet is comparatively clean as compared to the dedicated criminal hosts, and operations like Demand Media. One can also point to the inability of the U.S. to extradite criminals from the former Soviet Union as well as, the extremely weak criminal justice systems in Russia and the Ukraine.

In the end, this will have national security implications because a foreign enemy could easily debilitate commerce in the United States using our own computers against us.

(emphasis from original source)

ON a related note, if you’re curious what information Microsoft stores about you, as a user of their services, and their policy on releasing data to authorities, you could download this brief, non-technical Microsoft document (pdf) from Wikileaks (via Schneier).