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Patriot Act Haunts Google Service

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the patriot-act-so-good-at-making-friends dept.

The Globe and Mail has an interesting piece taking a look at Google's latest headache, the US Government. Many people are suddenly deciding to spurn Google's services and applications because it opens up potential avenues of surveillance. "Some other organizations are banning Google's innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures."

7 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Privacy is an illusion by rbanzai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The war over privacy in the U.S. was fought during the last eight years and common people lost. Nothing is secure. No information is out of reach of any government agency that decides it wants it, and there are no legal protections. Laws are in place now to make sure that our old image of privacy can never be restored, no matter what the current presidential candidates might claim. They don't us t have that privacy back because it does not serve their purpose.

    The war was fought. We lost. I don't blame people from other nations for being concerned but if they haven't already lost privacy where they live they soon will, and it isn't coming back.

  2. How did google get singled out? by joeflies · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ever look at the kind of data stored in an online CRM, like salesforce.com? complete sales records, every email to every client, all the product defect issues. Maybe the SEC and the IRS may decide to look at raw data and not wait for the auditor report to come back.

  3. Re:Not good enough by grcumb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Spurning these services will mark you out for further surveillance straight away.

    'Mark you out?' The fact of the matter is, everything we transmit outside of the firewall is subject to surveillance these days. And most companies have no clue how much of their data is crossing the firewall every day.

    I don't know why people are getting their knickers in a knot over Google, when the main problem lies with the US backbone carriers, who - with only one known exception - have opened their networks to constant and widespread monitoring by US security agencies. Google at very least had the guts to fight a public legal battle with the Feds over release of even sanitised data.

    The story here may be the danger to companies when they bring these companies inside the firewall, but again, refusing to trust Google is a funny place to start enforcing data integrity. The plain and simple fact is that the greatest threat of corporate data leaks is from staff who, whether through sins of omission or commission, carry sensitive data on laptops, thumb drives, CDs without any protections whatsoever.

    I'd like to believe that data protection regimes are so advanced in these companies that the potential threat posed by Google and other online services is the main concern, but I find that impossible to do. I have to conclude, therefore that this is nothing more than a tiny kernel of truth wrapped in chocolatey FUD-ness that PHBs and corporate counsel love so much.

    --
    Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
  4. Re:"Patriot" act by Sperbels · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All they have to do is shout "Think of the children" or "We need this to fight terrorism" and the majority who have no interest in delving into the consequences of any given action will line up behind them like good little citizens. That'll only work for so long. Then they'll need a new boogey man to scare the shit out of everyone. It's almost amusing sometimes to watch old movies to see how our nation's top boogey man evolves... right now I'm thinking of Back to the Future. During that era, the boogey men were Libyans. They used to be Russians, and Germans/Japanese before that, and now it's Al Qaida. Is there ever a time when we don't single out someone as the enemy and use them as an excuse to gain more control of the domestic population? I guess I just hate freedom...don't listen to me.
  5. No rule of law with data hosted in the US by farbles · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The trouble here is not Google, it is the fact there is no longer the rule of law with regards to data hosted in the United States. When the government can take any information they like from a server hosted in their country with no warrant, no notification, no nothing, then it's not law, it's criminal activity no matter who does it.

    Here in Canada this has been a big deal now for the last couple of years. I've been at many IT meetings where tracking down what was hosted on US-based servers and removing it back to Canada has been on the agenda. We're not perfect here but we do have PIPEDA, the protection of privacy act, binding our ISPs. You need access to data, convince a judge and get a warrant. That's the rule of law.

    That this US government data free-for-all has not been a big deal to American sysadmins has been a source of more than a little concern and confusion to us here north of the border. As long as there remains an Emperor in the White House rather than a President I guess there will be no movement on this.

    Erased White House email, backups, and hard drives without penalty despite a legal court order? That's some government you guys have running there. You might want to do something about it.

  6. Re:Tragically PGP is too hard to use by Zatar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not just hard to use, it's also ugly as hell. I thought about starting to use PGP again recently and just using it for digital signatures makes my email nearly unreadable never mind using actual encryption. Here's a nice one-line email:

    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
    Hash: SHA1

    Hey dude, how's it going?
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
    Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)

    iD8DBQFH6CrifPJd VEzW7qwRAs8fAKCSg8j qWO8zfHpIrNKJ zBtrHF54UwCfQWhO
    lGZk7Ys4hl e1OqxyEuHn1EY=
    =izSS
    -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

    If I sent this it a non-geek they'd probably go WTF? and tell me my email program is broken.

    It would need to be transparently integrated into all popular email programs so that no one actually needs to see the code in their inbox. An argument could be made that in the long run PGP has actually made the problem worse by allowing email vendors to punt on the concept of encryption and just tell users "if you want encryption use PGP" instead of having to develop an integrated solution that actually works well enough for mass adoption.

  7. Are they just NOW figuring that out? by erroneus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm rather surprised more aggressive measures to circumvent US communications and all other paths of commerce and communications haven't been attempted. Wanna do warrantless wiretaps on foreigners? Fine. Watch the foreigners build new lines of communications that do not connect to the U.S. Wanna log, fingerprint, probe and scan all foreigners who happen to fly over or through the U.S.? Fine. Watch the foreigners start to build airports in Mexico and Canada to avoid U.S. soil. Wanna monitor and observe all foreign commerce through U.S. banks? You get the idea.

    At some point, the rest of the world will tire of these policies and take step to make the U.S. less relevant.