Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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What the hell? Is that real? There are actually people stupid enough to upload their medical history to Google? Why?
That's the scariest thing I've seen all week.
Maybe not
Especially while American workers and domestic operated industries are hurting and threatened with even more hurt, the American people's security, both economic security and the resulting national security, would benefit by the American people investing more in American workers. American legal jurisdiction and yes, even patriotism, also make domestic operations even more securable than those outsourced to foreign corporations whose security integrity can be bought, perhaps as cheaply as Americans bought their basic IT operations.
The US government should always weight IT procurement decisions, in fact any expenditures, in favor of American vendors. The more 100% American the operations, and therefore the staff and the nearby economic circulation of the fees spent on them, the more favored they should be against foreign competitors for the American government contracts. And in fact, some essential operations should never be outsourced to foreigners, and probably not even outsourced at all outside the government itself, and its longterm civil servants.
If saving money were more important than protecting Americans, we wouldn't spend any of the $TRILLIONS we spend on security and defense. I'd love to see the millions of Americans so up in arms about immigration set their priority as defending our government operations from "foreign occupation", which would actually defend the country and even find a lot more solidarity among their fellow Americans.
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make install -not war
You could always move all your servers to Canada and not have those unnecessary insecure servers in the US. Seems like someone made a bad decision setting up your infrastructure having them in the US to begin with seeing as you have global clients.
Hey, what gives? You got anything to hide or what?
Some people do need to touch the hot stove. I stopped trying to keep them from doing it, people don't learn 'til they burn their hands.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You mean the US's total disregard for everyone's rights in the name of the "War on Terror(ism)" makes people wary of allowing them near themselves or their data?
I'd never have guessed...
The keys would be kept in Canada.
Well the newsworthyness is lower for the Canadians who have been dealing with hyper-aggressive Americans since 2001. There were a number of obvious abuses of power that clued Canada in quick.
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/26684res20060906.html
and most of those were just against other Americans by their own government.
If they treat their own citizens like that, why would we expect them to respect the rights of another nations citizens. Particularly over things like privacy which has been long protected to a higher standard in Canada than the US.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
I'm sure the US Government would not allow sensitive (or any) information to be stored on a foreign soil server, so why should Canada be any different.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
What moron stores extremely sensitive data on random untrusted systems? Especially any kind of sensitive government data.
Sure, let's let Lockheed Martin store their working research on what they're building as our next latest stealth spy planes on computers in Germany and Canada. This is a great idea.
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Actually, it's supposed to work that way under the US Constitution.
The Legislative branch makes the law. Second, the Executive branch executes the law. Last, the Judicial branch interprets the law. Each branch has an effect on the other.
Legislative Branch
Executive Branch
Judicial Branch
These checks are inefficient. And this inefficiency is borne out when one political party in the US system captures all three of the branches (as it has) and then, for the purpose of extending the power of that party, fails to exercise restraint and to provide a check on the other branches.
What I have noted is that the only branch that has actually decided to act in a manner consistent with Constitutional checks and balances is the Supreme Court. To the extent the Legislative Branch (or branches of the various States) have worked to mandate sentencing or require judges to act without their power to interpret, the Supreme Court has ruled these requirements as nothing more than guidelines. And this has gone on despite a rather radical shift in the Supreme Court to the political right. And I would agree with them, even though my own political direction differs strongly from many of their recent decisions and statements.
The Orwellian-named "USA Patriot Act" was a bill that was utterly altered -- in its entirety -- in the middle of the night by Bush's Attorney General, John Ashcroft within a committee that was also completely asleep at the switch. This is part of the rules of Congress, where a committee will take in a b
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Shouldn't governments be particularly sensitive about not having a role in picking economic winners and losers?
I suppose, if one's outlook is a narrow view where the idealogy of capitalism overrules all other ideas. My own opinion is that one of the prime responsibilities of government is to set responsible policy. The citizenry or business interests are free to pursue things however they want in the context of the policy.
When viewed in that light, the notion of "picking winners and losers" is a construct that's as absurd as it is political. If a government chooses to raise mileage standards or raise taxes to offset the costs of environmental degradation, for example, Ford is free to go broke trying to sell SUVs, just as Toyota is free to build another plant in Ohio to meet increased sales. If the government adopts an open document format policy, Microsoft is free to adapt or continue their current practices. If there's any picking involved, it's being done in the corporate boardroom.
A sovereign government mandating local storage may indeed interfere with certain business models, but then again, so what? One door closes, another one opens. That's not to say the politics of the issue aren't interesting or worth discussing.
...you want your data to be secure?
Disconnect it from the net.
given the vast amount of digital leakage and other human errors, who are you really putting trust in?
It's not even about sensitivity. It's simply the uncertainty that the US government deems it their right to, at any time, for any harebrained reason, snoop into your data. No sane company or even governmental institution would accept that. It's like legalizing industrial (and other) espionage.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd rather vote for someone who is soft on terror than someone who is soft on defending freedom.
But I noticed the US voters want "strong" leaders. People who make decisions and follow them through, no matter what. If they're wrong, they're wrong, but that's still better than changing their mind.
I guess, as a European, I won't fully understand that. And I guess neither would any US voter understand why we can vote for parties and politicians who tell you the exact opposite they told you 5 years ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why is there even an article on this? Obviously if your a foreign entity and suddenly whoever was holding your data went to war with your country, your data is their data now. Iraq proved we can go to war practically overnight. I've never thought it was a good idea to outsource email. Why in the world would you outsource your computing as a normal course of biz? Basically I have one immutable tenet, without phyiscal security you have no security. Translation, if my data is not sitting on my property, I have no idea what happens to it.
May I sum it up?
The time of enlightenment brought us the separation of church and state. What we need is a second time of enlightenment, separating enterprises and state.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd prefer to have all of my medical data stored by Google than to have it spread between different hospitals and private practices, each one with a different view on how they should deal with your data and none of which have ever shown me their privacy policies. Not to mention that their policies are very close to Google's, since they have to follow the same laws...That's the scariest thing I've seen all week.
It's not even about sensitivity. It's simply the uncertainty that the US government deems it their right to, at any time, for any harebrained reason, snoop into your data. No sane company or even governmental institution would accept that. It's like legalizing industrial (and other) espionage.
If you were from somewhere with data protection laws then it's most likely to be illegal to store certain kinds of data anywhere which dosn't have at least similar laws and/or the appropriate treaties in place.
Doing daily business would require bringing the keys and the data together. Whoever is empowered to do so for normal operations will simply be waterboarded until the keys appear.
Better to move the keys, data, servers and administrative staff to a friendlier jurisdiction.
Have gnu, will travel.
And that would work because no Canadian ever needs to travel to the US and the US is never above arresting a visitor for something that they did somewhere else.
Much as I dislike the Patriot Act, I rather suspect that Patriot Act or no Patriot Act, the US government would snoop on any foreign government's data available to it. And foreign governments (even "friendly) ones would do the same to the US. The time when gentlemen didn't read other gentleman's mail is long past.
> I'm sure the US Government would not allow sensitive (or any) information to be stored on a foreign soil server,
...or China for that matter.
> so why should Canada be any different.
> think Google cooperating with the Chinese government
People seem to forget that the Chinese gov consider the US to be just as 'bad' as the US gov considers them; and, in many ways, they have a point, but it's the perception that's the key in this case, not the reality (whatever it might be).
Max.
> It doesn't have anything to do with the patriot act as much as it has to do with slashdot's alterior motive to spread paranoia and hate about the USA.
Well, it is run by "Americans" (from the USA, not anywhere else in America), and USA people have proved that they seem hell bent on spreading paranoia about and hate for the USA - it's something they're undeniably best at.
Max.
It works akin to the ice cream vendors theory.
Imagine a beach, stretching for a mile. There are people lying on the right, people on the left, scattered over the beach. There are two vendors of ice cream, positioned pretty much at 25% and 75% of the beach. Both of them make ample business.
Then one vendor ponders. If I move towards the middle, some people from the other side might come to me when I'm closer. The ones on the far end have to come to me anyway, since the other vendor is even further away.
Of course, this doesn't go unnoticed, the other vendor notices the lack of income, he realizes his competitor moved towards the center and, nobody to let a good idea go uncopied, does the same.
At the end, they are standing back to back in the middle of the beach. They both now make less profit, since the customers on the far ends think their ice cream just ain't worth it to walk half a mile for some ice cream. And in the long run, they don't think ice cream isn't so swell anyway.
It's left to the reader to ponder how this applies to politics.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.