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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?"
The Patriot Act hurts the US IT industry.
Why should a foreign investor risk it to bring his IP to the US with the threat hanging over his head that suddenly it's declared illegal to export it, should he discover something the US deems "useful for terrorism" (read: something we'd rather have in the hands of US companies than others)?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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Shouldn't governments be particularly sensitive about not having a role in picking economic winners and losers?
Beyond that, their stance seems relatively well founded. Take a look at the new privacy policies for Google Health... saying that they might release your records in some situations when required to do so by law.
But, I think the summary doesn't make it sufficiently clear that this is just government IT departments, not all information technology in Canada. Private citizens and businesses can still do as they wish.
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Electronics kits for the digital generation.
Imagine, a government actually concerned about rampant abuses by the American Executive branch, and attempting to protect its citizens.
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
I'm not really sure how "news worthy" this is. As one example, the Ontario Education Act prohibits public schools in Ontario from using text books that are not written by Canadian authors.
The Canadian government trying to keep things in Canada is very standard practice. I didn't RTFA and I'm sure it mentions the Patriot Act, but I really doubt the Patriot Act is the sole reason that they won't outsource hosting companies to the US. Their policy is most likely that they can not outsource anything to anywhere outside of Canada unless they have no choice.
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.
From capacity to "service level agreements" that guarantee little, cloud computing has business problems.
I went to this talk at Stanford by the head of "cloud computing" at Amazon. Technically, Amazon's approach to "cloud computing" is quite impressive. As a business, it works for a special reason - Amazon's load is 4X greater than normal during the buying season before Xmas. Amazon has to size their data centers for the Xmas buying season. For the rest of the year they have vast excess capacity. That's why Amazon's "cloud" is so cheap to use.
So Amazon's "cloud" is a great service, unless you need it during November and December.
The keys would be kept in Canada.
It is not just governments. Universities and other institutions have obligations under Canadian privacy laws. If they store data in the US, for example by using GMail accounts or online question services from text book companies, the US government can gain access to private data on Canadian students and the University will then be liable for a breach of privacy under Canadian law.
This has meant that at least some Canadian Universities are looking at implementing policies which forbid the storing of data in the US. The result undoubtedly will have some economic impact on the US since now either US companies will have to invest in Canadian based servers or be automatically disqualified from bidding on IT contracts (although I also understand that the US government can force US companies to reveal data even if it is not stored in the US so it may rule out any US company). This is not just hypothetical either - to my knowledge it has already affected contract decisions.
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.
...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?
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".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
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.