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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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.