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Tech Giants In Human Rights Deal
Ostracus writes "Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed a global a code of conduct promising to offer better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion." Anyone want to know what this means for China & Australia? I bet it means even less to all of us in America where every major data center has a secret room where the government sniffs our packets.
Unless these companies are willing to stand up and pull out of countries like China if their governments refuse to back down, then this agreement is as worthless as the paper it's written on. The same advice applies to business PR spin as applies to political PR spin: "Look at actions, not words, for the REAL story."
And yes, this privacy policy should apply to the U.S. government as well. No special exception should be made just because the U.S. President runs around yelling "9-11!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'll bet there's something in there 'respecting local laws' or similar, so the code will have no teeth.
As soon as the Chinese say 'this AC is suspected of being Falun Gong', or the French say 'this AC has a SS dagger for sale', or the Australians say 'this AC has offended Family First', each and every signatory to the code will lube up and bend over.
Sorry, but I don't think Google, Microsoft or Yahoo have the balls to stand up for free speech when faced with a lawsuit.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
The "principles" they've signed can be disregarded if necessary to protect "national security or public order, or public health or morals".
This is, of course, interpreted so broadly by those in power that the declaration becomes essentially useless.
Yeah! How can the rooms be secret if you're posting them on Slashdot. Now the secret rooms under the ###### ### #########, they are the true danger.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'd personally rather have them sniff my packets than outright block things I love. Australia obviously missed the memo: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5430343841227974645&hl=en
It's not far off reality. There isn't an NSA room in every data centre, but there might as well be, since their placement at major Internet hubs throughout the USA is equivalent. The story is quite well known.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
Unless NGO's have an office/unit internally within Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google to oversee their conducts and verify their compliance to the flashy Global Code they are taunting - all this is just a PR stunt.
With ANY company:
I plan on not showering so I can have the most skid-marked packets for their sniffing pleasure.
As for China, I'm sure they'll just going to go along with this. That's what they usually do in reply to any external pressure regarding online rights. They just didn't realize the errors of their ways!
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
(And maybe some other people)
What does it mean when Google says they will be doing business in china? Would China normally block www.google.com unless they get a business license in China? Is there another reason why the average Chinese citizen wouldn't have access to google.com? (or google.cn or èæOE or whatever?)
Or is this just that Google wants to start selling advertisements in China?
Eschew Obfuscation
Any contract or promise contrary to the law is null and void.
"It is very little more than a broad statement of support for a general principle without any concrete backup mechanism to ensure that the guidelines will be followed."
This is little more than a PR stunt used to shore up their public image. The agreement language is vague, and there are questions about if it is even binding. It can probably not even be enforced, because in most countries, conspiracy is a crime. So if a company should do anything which would hinder prosecution, they could be charged with:
I'm not counting on this having any effect other than people saying, "Look, Google really isn't evil!". Which is exactly the intended effect.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
One of my cats was sniffing my packets when I woke up this morning.
Freakin' weirdo.
I'd worry less about the government sniffing and more about double-click, google or other advertisers. They're poised to bombard you with junk created just to tempt you, while the gov can't keep track of its own watchlists. Anyway, you're still allowed to encrypt packets to keep the g-men out... for now.
I used to work as a sysadmin for a major datacenter. There was no room as far as I knew. If there was, it was pretty hidden from everyone.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
Also, it seems obvious that if the government wanted to spy on traffic, they wouldn't do it at endpoints like datacenters. They would do it at major routers.
"better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion."
Are they trying to protect us, or themselves against ? Am I getting cynical in my old age, or does this read like it's a demand for less red-tape/taxes etc. dressed up as protecting our rights to free speech?
TFA doesn't include it, and without being able to read it, it's all hearsay.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No, we just pay attention to Congressional Testimony. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908
Same here.
Google and Yahoo are both building major new datacenters within 15 miles of me, and Microsoft is building a new one within 100 miles. I plan on checking out all the new datacenters as well when I apply for jobs there.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
There's nothing in the article that talks about how this will be enforced. So, I want to know how will this be enforced? What will be the repercussions for a company that violates the agreement? How will compliance be measured and accounted for? Who will oversee this to ensure that the companies involved are complying? Without answers to these questions this agreement among companies is "just promises." And promises are largely worthless.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/global-network-initiative
Still, the EFF isn't completely satisfied with the results:
This is a nice idea but it won't work. Machiavellian followers agree that treaties are designed to entice your enemies into lowering their guard. The company that abandons this treaty first will gain the most, while the other two are mired in the red tape. And we all know that it is only Machiavellian principles that guide corporations, so I must be right!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
yes that is exactly what they do. DataCenters in general is overbroad, so lets call them Telco CommCenters instead.
They don;t have a tap in my companies server room, they have a tap in my companies ISPs server room.
...for precisely the same reasons.
In pretty much any country of the world they would be forced to submit data for law enforcement issues, and probably taxation purposes(we certainly wouldn't want to short the government what they want, would we?). Then there are lobbyist groups like PETA that might try to interfere with content.
I can't see where anything will change, they certainly won't back you up with legal support to help you maintain your freedoms, even if you're blatantly being abused by some government agency and/or law enforcement office.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Perhaps you should clarify, for hyperbole's sake, that there is one NSA room in one major hub. It's well-known now, and the government has gotten quite a lot of crap about it.
Conspiracy theory is when you extend this, sans evidence, to "they must have one in every major hub".
I thought I read:
Sure feels that way sometimes...sick gov't!
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
"Code of Conduct" is a euphemism for "idealized behavior that we can put aside when practical reality sets in." What we really need are LAWS that are enforced and that punish people the agencies and authorities in power when they are broken.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
They were largely responsible for the Great Firewall of China.
So I would think that their involvement, as well as that of Nortel and other network gear OEMs, is more desirable than that of Application/OS/Search companies.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
the guys from the rooms behind the back-office send a small wake-up packet to a router/switch with a certain serial-number, thus activating the TBL.
The TBL extracts its instructions from the traffic coming from the Search Engine. It loads the spy-program tailored to this very company/institution.
Data reported back is hidden also in traffic to the search engine.
the TBL ought to be written with dirty programming so it will be difficult to proof it is in the firmware of the router/switch.
no need for costly Echelon any more!
"I bet it means even less to all of us in America where every major data center has a secret room where the government sniffs our packets."
And, since you're willing to make an outright lie such as that, your opinion means what?
...and I thought they used ECHELON to spy on all traffic Net, Phone, other ....
Which the likes of US companies could do nothing about ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
After all, you've just told everybody about them...
They're not always in a room, in some places they have a cage like everyone else. Referred to as the "fed rack".
Common knowledge, not conspiracy theory.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
Did you make sure they had the proper warrants? Did you inform the customers of the real reason for the problems if they didn't have warrants, or if they didn't have gag orders? If you didn't protect your customers from federal agents overstepping their bounds, or informing them of the actions of the federal agents, you are part of the problem.
Now, if they had the proper warrants and court orders, then, by all means, you should help them out. If not, then you should tell them to read the Constitution and get back to you when they have done their job properly.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
This might be the scariest thing I've ever read. You wouldn't tell the customer that someone showed up with a court order to see the drive and you had no choice but to comply? Did the FBI or SS at least show up with a court order? Did your legal department always review it first, how long did they have to do that? In what way were you bound to not tell the customer?
/.'ers have experience with being forced to turn over 3rd party private data?
It makes me itch in a very major way that the customer's legal department never got engaged. I can't imagine that you guys would defend their rights to privacy as zealously as they might. It's also creepy as hell that the customer didn't know that they were being snooped upon while their trusted service provider inflicts them with downtime and lies about the reason for it.
Do other
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Absolutely. Until money flows out of corporate coffers over this systemetic abuse, Until people go to jail over this systemetic abuse, the rest is just white-wash. Punish people who do bad things. Punish people who enable the doing of bad things, the popular legal phrase is 'conspiricy to commit ...' and 'providing material support to ...'
Yes, because Microsoft is strongly opposed to censorship. /rant
I wonder how this will apply to the Great Firewall of AUSTRALIA? The news of late has been a magnitude more disturbing than the norm. Reading the signs of the time, it is clear that the elite at the top of the trapezoid of power are preparing to shear the sheeple.
Micro$oft is the opposite of what it claims to be - it is a MegaFirm and not prepared to make any sacrifices whatsoever for Freedom. Moreover, Google isn't really in much of a position to criticize others for intruding upon the privacy of others now, is it? One of the first things I do every time I boot Windoze is kill GoogleUpdate.exe, and theres now google.exe as well. Annoyingly, these are listed as SYSTEM processes, which is misleading in one sense, however in the sense that it is part of a system of control it is painfully honest.
To quote the great Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for evil men to triumph is for good men to do nothing".
I'll end this rant by planting a seed that will hopefully take root... The most appropriate immediate response that I can think of to this is a good old Google Bomb - if this BBC article was the top of the list when "hypocrisy" was searched, we'd have a small piece of justice.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
.
The government knows 300,000,000 people who interest it more than you.
The geek is infinitely more likely to sniffed at by his boss, his neighbor, his wife and kids, his dog - assuming he has been out of the basement long enough to acquire one or all of the above.
_____
This being the season of Halloween, I have been wonderingly idly what horrors truly lie behind that false wall the Hannibal-Geek has run up in his cellar.
What cabalistic meaning he finds in "34-24-36."
Though it's probably nothing more than the combination to his old high school locker,
They don't necessarily have a "secret room", but as I understand, CALEA, etc., requires every telco to have a plan in place to apply a tap to every circuit that they provide.
Yes, I am a network administrator at a telco, and yes, the company I had to work for had to produce a CALEA-compliance plan about a year ago.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If cop shows like CSI are even slightly accurate, if you tell a cop to get a warrant, they get a warrant to search your whole business, then they seize all of your servers and backups to make sure they got the relevant data, and you never get them back due to all the red tape. And since they're the good guys on these shows, I suppose we're all supposed to cheer them on! Just about every time a store owner says "No you can't have my camera tapes without a warrant" good old Jim Brass says "OK, we'll get a warrant to search your whole store since you're acting suspicious and obstructing an investigation. You can reopen some time next year once we're sure we have everything."
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Now, that's certainly believable. But having a plan in place to apply a tap to every circuit they provide is different from having such a tap active.
I don't really think they should even have a plan in place to do such a thing, but the typical hyperbolic statement is "the government is actively monitoring all of your packets and phone conversations", which simply isn't true.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
I strongly hope that you asked for the warrant before sending out the "Sorry for the inconvenience" message, and told them to get lost if they couldn't produce it? Otherwise, I'd sure like to know where that is, so I can avoid it.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Yeah! How can the rooms be secret if you're posting them on Slashdot. Now the secret rooms under the ###### ### #########, they are the true danger.
I believe you meant, "Now the secret rooms under the {redacted} they are the true danger."
Welcome to the Glorious Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics!
I worked at a major data center about 10 years ago. There was no secret room but there was hidden equipment that belonged to the government. I was fairly high up in the company and I only learned about it years after it was installed. I was never officially told about it, but my boss happened to mention what it was one day. If he hadn't mentioned it, I would never have suspected it was there.
"Damn, this toupee itches! My grandfather stole it from Dwight Eisenhower"
which is totally what she said
1) Any packet which leaves your local network must be assumed to be intercepted by the authorities in your country.
2) Any data provided to anyone you can't personally trust must be assumed to be available to the authorities in your country.
2a) You can't personally trust any corporation, association, partnership, etc.
These apply to _any_ country in any situation.
If you're of special interest to any 1st or 2nd world government, you have to assume
3) All data on your own machines is already compromised, unless you take extreme precautions to avoid those machines being associated with you.
If you're of extreme interest to the US government or any of its allies, you must also assume
4) The authorities can read any of your encrypted data, if they find out it is associated with you, even if they do not acquire the keys.
All this applies whether Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are sincere or not (and of course they aren't). Even if they don't provide the data willingly, governments will find a way to get it.
If cop shows like CSI are even slightly accurate
Stop there. They're not.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I will not try to make myself look more moral than my competitors by raising a stink about (or, even worse, leaving a country over) a foreign government's odious requests.
That is all.
Only on Slashdot could you be modded "troll" for calling that a conspiracy theory
(crick) (crick)
What? There is something else to say?
If you want us to believe you, Google, then Do Less Evil!
If you want us to believe you, Microsoft, ummmmm... uhhh... well, you have broken your word so consistently and persistently, and for so long, I doubt we will ever believe you again. You really need to work on that.
Yahoo, just straighten up, will you? If you kept your word while the others continued to be hypocrites, you might gain some real market share!
Of more concern is censorship, which our government in Australia is reportedly planning. A little bit of censorship is like a little bit of pregnant.
Censorship will not stop powerful memes, which probably grow better in adversity anyway, but it might hinder their development.
I really couldn't give a stuff whether they sniff packets or the chair on which a hot female sat.
Making sure they had the proper warrants wasn't my job. That part was all over my head. My boss would just tell me when someone was coming over to get a drive.
Like I've said here before, knowing about warrants wasn't really my job. I have no clue if they ever had proper warrants.
I probably shouldn't say what company it was, but they had over 20,000 servers when I left. They've grown much more since then. I bet it's the same at any major hosting company. If you have that many servers, you're bound to have some involved in heavy financial crimes or terrorist websites.