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Patriot Act Clouds Picture For Tech

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-data-is-safe-except-from-us dept.

Harperdog writes "Politico has a piece on how the Patriot Act is interfering with U.S. firms trying to do business overseas in the area of cloud computing. Here's a quote: 'The Sept. 11-era law was supposed to help the intelligence community gather data on suspected terrorists. But competitors overseas are using it as a way to discourage foreign countries from signing on with U.S. cloud computing providers like Google and Microsoft: Put your data on a U.S.-based cloud, they warn, and you may just put it in the hands of the U.S. government.'"

1 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who can blame them? by kozubik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not all providers are based in a single nation.

    Amazon, for instance, has AWS locations around the world, although that probably doesn't help you much given their track record.

    But rsync.net (I am the founder) has storage locations in Zurich and Hong Kong, in addition to the US. These sites are protected, just like the US sites, by the Warrant Canary:

    http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

    So while I agree that everyone in the world should be wary of USA PATRIOT, it's not a given that non-US consumers have to avoid US providers across the board.