Patriot Act Dampening Cloud Computing?

Julie188 writes "Governments are turning the Internet into a cyberspace reflection of real-world geographic conflicts. One report says that the Canadian government is forbidding its IT organizations to use services that store or host the government's data outside their sovereign territory. They especially cannot use services where the data is stored in the United States because of fears over the Patriot Act. What kinds of jurisdiction issues might people face — think Google cooperating with the Chinese government — as cloud computing becomes the norm and your data is stored in 'offshore parts' of the cloud?"

Comments

Re: Good Government

[Opportunist]

There are two extremes. One is "winner takes all", which invariably leads to a (mostly) two party system, with little hope for a third party to rise to importance. The other one is "let everyone in who gets a vote", a system Italy had for a long time, leading to dozens of minuscle parties holding a seat or two, with coalitions between so many parties that governments fall apart, on average, after a year (that's pretty much Italy's average).

Either system is, in my opinion, doomed to be dissatisfying for the voter. The former because if the parties are too similar (as they are now, to an outsider's view), there is no real choice. The latter because you just know it doesn't matter how you vote, they won't get anything done anyway because no idea gets a majority.

Most European countries today have a minimum limit to get a seat in the parlament. You need at least 4-7% (varying between countries) to have a seat. Usually, gaining that much support already gives you a few seats right away. And while 4% doesn't sound like a lot, it pretty much means that the average European parlament contains about 4-6 parties.

This usually (if not almost always) leads to coalition governments. Which has its advantages (radical changes in policies are nearly unheard of) and of course disadvantages. Today, the disadvantages start to show a lot more than they did in the past, it seems our parties are too concerned to show "weakness" to cooperate anymore. More than one country has a coalition today that can't get anything sensibly done because the coalition partners are unwilling or unable to agree on compromises, because they fear their voters will feel they "lost their line" and "gave in".

Very true

[Mr_Icon]

I work at a large Canadian university and we're expressly forbidden from storing *any* student-related information, no matter how insignificant, on non-Canadian servers. This doesn't just include things like gmail, but also various payment processing services, online storage providers (think Amazon's S3), and even things like Google Analytics. The latter is so ubiquitous, I'm not sure we're succeeding in extricating it from university-owned websites, and each time we have to explain to people why sending sensitive information about our users' browsing habits to the US is not a good idea.

I don't think this policy has much to do with the Patriot Act, though I'm sure it acted as a catalyst. We'd probably not store any data in Netherlands either. If you're an institution that has to worry about compliance with various national privacy laws, it makes sense to store all information either within the organization, or at least within the same country.

Re:I said it before, I say it again

[iago-vL]

That's exactly correct. I work for the security department of a Canadian government, and we've decreed that no data can be stored on American servers, sensitive or otherwise.