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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."
Spurning these services will mark you out for further surveillance straight away.
Have they never read Crime and Punishment?
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
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?
Yup. In the UK, here, the Data Protection Act makes it legally dubious to put anyone else's data onto Google. Here, there's a responsibilty to protect personal data.
Perfect time to consider PGP.
http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
You mean, if I enter personal information on a free web server run by some organization whose business model is the harvesting and sale of personal information, that my personal information might not be kept private?
Horror of horrors.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
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.
Uncle Sam says "Do your part, keep data in America!"
When you host abroad, your hosting with Osama!
Privacy is for the unpatriotic!
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."
While I am not one of the Google faithful I must say that your criticism is at best miss placed.
Google has fought when the US government wanted them to turn over customer records in the past. They do not seem to cooperate with the US government anymore than is required by law. Anytime you use a hosted service you loose some privacy. Once the data leaves your systems you have lost some privacy and control.
If you want to scream at Google for not living up to there "Don't be evil" line. I suggest that there following US laws it far less evil than their good relationship with China.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Never mind the fact that almost no one except serious geeks have even heard of, much less actually understands, public key encryption.
This has a spoofed link whose structure identical to this post http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496946&cid=22837250 which, when clicked on, downloads a virus, brings up dozens of pages in Firefox in seconds and tries to use mailto: BEWARE curious people.
Someone should tell the US Gooberment that all their Crackberry©(tm) e-mail traffic goes through a data center in Canada, eh? See how fast The Bushies and Their Henchmen annex The Great White North, eh?
I can debunk this one easily.
Google works as advertised and works well.
You name one government service that has ever worked as advertised or worked well.
Clearly, Google is too productive and effective to be a government thing.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
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.
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.
annex The Great White North
Be very careful! Look what happened the last time the US fell out with Canada! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
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.
...why anyone would entrust any data of any importance at all, secret or not, to free services provided by an advertising agency. I can see using it to plan your frat party or organize Little League games, but using it for business?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
I agree that exposing the extent of this could definitely help. When I received multiple FBI subpoenas in 2004 for Insecure.Org web logs, I notified Nmap users and it was posted to various web sites, including Slashdot.
After all of that press four years ago, the subpoenas stopped and I haven't received another one since. Maybe it is just a coincidence, but I'm happy about it nonetheless.
In other Nmap news, version 4.60 was just released. You might want to download it with Tor though, just to be on the safe side in case the subpoenas resume :).
-Fyodor
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."