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US Government: You Don't Own Your Cloud Data So We Can Access It At Any Time
New submitter jest3r writes "On Tuesday the EFF filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload's service and denied third parties access to their property. Many businesses used Megaupload's cloud service to store and share files not related to piracy. The government is calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require individuals or small companies to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings just to get their own property back. Additionally, the government's argument that you lose all your property rights by storing your data on the cloud could apply to Amazon's S3 or Google Apps or Apple iCloud services as well (see page 4 of their filing)."
Does this mean that all of those copyrighted works I am hosting "in the cloud" are no longer the property of their respected copyright holders? I can see this being argued in all sorts of funny ways.
Shouldn't the EFF argue that a cloud service is the equivalent of a bank's safe deposit box? Someone else holds your property on your behalf. For SDBs, the government needs a warrant...just like if your stuff was in the cloud.
Actually you do for cloud services. Read the contracts that Google has....so the government can argue you don't have any expectation of property rights if you waive them with the cloud carrier. Then again, you could argue, the contract is between you and google and not the government. Therefore the government cannot assume it gets the same rights, as set force in the contract, as the cloud carrier.
Oooo the arguments....
This is like the government saying that your car no longer belongs to you when you park it on a public road. Bullshit indeed.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Dose it apply to http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
This actually happened in the UK. based on some very dubious statistics about the likely contents of the safeboxes.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Here is an analogy;
I rent a locker at a local storage locker company. ... and gets caught.
The guy with the locker next to mine, fills his with drugs
Police put a crime scene tape around the entire facility and block my access to my stuff.
Police want to verify that there isn't any drugs in my locker.
What happens next?
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
Own the hardware and host it outside of the US.
We already had the majority of our equipment in Europe. We're moving the last of our data and processes over the next 60 days from Chicago to Amsterdam.
Totally irrelevant. But just the same, also factually wrong, so I'll reply:
Actually, no he didn't...not even close. You can go back a couple of decades to the Black Chamber, or even further back by centuries to Sir Walsingham. You could argue that Sun Tzu was a forerunner, but if I had to pick a single person to actually start the surveillance of citizens by government, I'd choose Walsingham. And you know what? He stopped a number of plots against Queen Elizabeth I that way, and it's really hard to argue that his methods were unnecessary or heavy-handed.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.