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The Fourth Amendment and the Cloud
CNET has up a blog post examining the question: does the Fourth Amendment apply to data stored in the Cloud? The US constitutional amendment forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures is well settled in regard to the physical world, but its application to electronic communications and computing lags behind. The post's argument outlines a law review article (PDF) from a University of Minnesota law student, David A. Couillard. "Hypothetically, if a briefcase is locked with a combination lock, the government could attempt to guess the combination until the briefcase unlocked; but because the briefcase is opaque, there is still a reasonable expectation of privacy in the unlocked container. In the context of virtual containers in the cloud...encryption is not simply a virtual lock and key; it is virtual opacity. ... [T]he service provider has a copy of the keys to a user's cloud 'storage unit,' much like a landlord or storage locker owner has keys to a tenant's space, a bank has the keys to a safe deposit box, and a postal carrier has the keys to a mailbox. Yet that does not give law enforcement the authority to use those third parties as a means to enter a private space. The same rationale should apply to the cloud." We might wish that the courts interpreted Fourth Amendment rights in this way, but so far they have not.
Shouldn't the same privacy logic apply even more to your laptops and personal electronic devices when you're entering U.S. borders? Having these people search your hard drive is an invasion of privacy.
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If you want your data to be safe,especially when you plan to store it online in this new-fangled cloud thing, then encrypt it. You can't trust a service provider to stand up to a government access order, and you can't rely on the security of a storage system that you didn't make yourself.
Be responsible for your own data privacy instead of relying on an ambiguous interpretation of an ammendment written before the days of digital data.
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Seriously. Can we just save everybody the trouble and travel 5 years into the future when this whole cloud FAD runs its course? Maybe by then all the hype surrounding Twitter and Facebook will have died down a bit. And hopefully use of the word "blogosphere" will be punishable by death.
And if the data center is in another country, would the 4th Amendment apply there?
If so, how would you enforce it? Soldiers with machine guns show up, grab all of your data, crack the encryption, and take what they want. And you'll do exactly what?
The data is gone and seen, so you're screwed. And even if you have super duper one hundred billion bit encryption, your data center and data are gone. So, you have up to the second back-ups?
Other than cost, I see no upside to cloud computing.
at the point when urine drug testing was mandated by the government for any company receiving government contracts. You know back in the days of Ronnie Raygun and the "Just Say No" crusades?
If you aren't secure against government searches OF YOUR OWN BODILY FLUIDS, do you really think that they will respect your right of privacy regarding some random 1s and 0s stored on a private corporation's computers somewhere?
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The US constitutional amendment forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures is well settled in regard to the physical world
Electrons in computers ARE part of the physical world.
Stop conceding that is it different!
IT'S NOT!
[T]he service provider has a copy of the keys to a user's cloud 'storage unit'
Why the hell would I want to give a copy of the keys to the service provider?
Just because you use the cloud to store bits of data doesn't mean that you'd want to store unencrypted bits of data there. Those that do risk distribution of your unencrypted data via a multitude of channels, including but certainly not limited to:
Why would anyone hand the keys to all their important data to a 3rd party that they don't personally know? Just because they're under a contract with that 3rd party? A contract drawn up exclusively by that 3rd party? With clauses designed to exclusively to protect that 3rd party?
This post starts with a false statement. 4th amendment rights are not well settled. They've been challenged and altered repeatedly within the last decade.
Specifically, would it be wise to assume that all, or any, backups will only be taken in america, or that the data won't get routed to or through another country.?
It's a big world out there and the USA is only a small part of it.
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A bit offtopic but I think it is important for lawmakers : stop doing analogies. Cryptography does not work like a lock or like an opaque case, owning cryptographic keys does not make you the landlord of anything. Cryptography works by taking a clear message and a key and mix them in a way that produces a seemingly random information but that can be made sense of thanks to the decoding key and the decoding algorithm. It is not that hard to understand. It requires 30 secondes of focus to understand and twenty minutes of thinking about and around, and you have understood the basis of crypto.
Dear lawmakers, please make laws about cryptography, not about analogies of cryptography if you don't want me to just be an analogy of a law abiding citizen.
Thanks.
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