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Patriot Act Haunts Google Service
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."
There's no reason why Google (et al) need keep logs of who's doing what. Websites keep logs largely to trace attacks, don't they? Can't they have a standard EFF-approved `we keep logs for 24 hours` policy, after which time they're removed permanently?
Perfect time to consider PGP.
http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
What is so patriotic about passing laws that will eventually put US companies out of business in the era of hosted applications while terrorists will simply move their sites abroad?
Many people are suddenly deciding to spurn Google's services and applications because it opens up potential avenues of surveillance.
Um, how about corporate espionage? Nothing, absolutely nothing, stops Google from harvesting everything they can get their hands on- and they have the storage systems and human expertise to do it.
Case and point: I emailed a link to a wiki I had just set up to 3 people, two of whom had Gmail accounts. A spider from Google hit the page hours before anyone else did, hitting the wiki just after I emailed the link out. There were no public links to the site, and no referral URL.
So, let's see: processing your email to show you relevant ads? Check. Processing email to feed URLs to their spider? Check. What else does Google do with your email? Wouldn't it be the greatest tool in their quivver- the "God Google"? Sit down with HipWebShit.com, then an hour after the meeting and see a)How many people search/click on links for HipWebShit b)Who from HipWebShit.com has sent gmail users email (and what it says...), c)Who is talking about HipWebShit from/to a Gmail account period (ie general "valley buz"?
Hint: why do you think Google has so many PhDs? It starts getting creepy when you realize that Google seems to work very hard to keep their employees inside the google campus as much as possible, how secretive their operations are (seriously, nobody can compete with them anymore- it's not like they're guarding the henhouse for competition reasons) and how cult-like the atmosphere is...
Please help metamoderate.
I think the bigger issue is how much information google is actually storing. I don't care if Canada's government respects the individual's privacy more.. the temptation is there for future abuse.
I'm not one that usually gets paranoid and I hate conspiracy theories.. but google worries me. Even if they never do anything wrong as a company, it just takes one person with bad intentions to make all that information public.
There is something wrong with a company that wants to be everything to everyone. (look at Microsoft)
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Can you imagine what Google could really do if they were utterly unscrupulous about manipulating the political process in their favor?
Every politician who crossed them would have every possible scandal associated with them come up on the front search page whenever somebody was looking for info about them. Politicians who did what Google told them to would have all their scandals banished to the 300th page.
Muck-raking reporters would be mysteriously signed up for Google Alerts on Google-hostile politicians, and might "mysteriously" receive private documents from the hard drives of those politicians & their interns who happen to be running the "Google Desktop" toolbar.
Or some hacker might "discover" how to get the search histories of selected politicians, and suddenly the politician has to explain why he keeps searching for child porn photos.
I propose Google Subpoena Gpoena - A searchable database of all of the gov't data requests and all associated legal documents, especially what is being requested and why.
... ... ... ... would seem legit.
The snooping would be greatly curtailed if there was no anonymity for a snooping govt. If every request was made naked in front of the teeming millions only the most vital info requests would occur.
Request for serches from machine No 000.000.000.0000 in relation to ongoing criminal investigation associated with charges of
Request for all machines that searched for "TSA" , "Liquid" , and "explosive" for ongoing terrorist investigation would suddenly seem quite dubious without better specifics.
Since the article is about collaboration tools (like Google Docs and mail), I certainly hope that Google is storing the relevant information!
As for other information (such as who is searching for what), well they're probably not storing significantly more than Yahoo or MSN. Google's just one of the more popular targets because they're pretty highly visible.
The Patriot act says that, under certain circumstances, a service provider may not notify its customers that they've released their records. That's one of the biggest issues here--companies want to know if their documents are being viewed.
Yup. Last time we invaded Canada, they kicked out asses back across the border. Although we did manage to burn down the Parliament in York (now Toronto) before leaving. :)
It's interesting, what they do and don't teach you about the War of 1812 in American schools. Like the fact that, oh, you know, we lost? Sure, we won a few nifty battles, but overall we lost the war. They didn't stop impressing our sailors or interfering with our trade because we fought a war over it, they stopped because they'd only been doing it as part of their war against Napoleon, and that war ended. In the treaty that ended the war, we agreed to a return to status quo ante bellum -- basically a big undo button: things were to return to exactly the state they were in before the war. But the British had been fine with the state of things before the war, we're the ones that had a list of demands for things to change. In the end, we agreed to no change. We did that because the alternative being argued by the other side was for the US to make territorial concessions to Britain. We were lucky we managed to get everyone to agree to just forget the whole thing, and doubly-lucky that the changing circumstances of the world basically obsoleted our original demands.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."