Slashdot Mirror
NSA Internet Spying Sparks Race To Create Offshore Havens For Data Privacy
schwit1 writes "Some European leaders are renewing calls for a 'euro cloud,' in which consumer data could be shared within Europe but not outside the region. Brazil is fast-tracking a vote on a once-dormant bill that could require that data about Brazilians be stored on servers in the country. And India plans to ban government employees from using email services from Google and Yahoo Inc. It is too soon to tell if a major shift is under way. But the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimates that fallout from revelations about NSA activities could cost Silicon Valley up to $35 billion in annual revenue, much of it from lost overseas business. A survey conducted this summer by the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group, found that 56% of non-U.S. members said security concerns made it less likely that they would use U.S.-based cloud services. Ten percent said they had canceled a contract. Even some companies that seek to profit from fears about U.S. snooping acknowledge that law-enforcement agencies in other countries want to catch up with Washington's capabilities. 'In the long run, there won't be any difference between what the U.S. or Germany or France or the U.K. is doing,' says Roberto Valerio, whose German cloud-storage company, CloudSafe GmbH, reports a 25% rise in business since the NSA revelations. 'At the end of the day, some agency will spy on you,' he says."
The answer is not consolidation but more decentralization.
it was called Cryptonomicon.
"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~Me
Before all this, people didn't even think about creating a real competitor for Google or Amazon. Now we can expect some real options for these services soon. This is good news for everyone, thank you USA!
I'm glad that someone is attempting to quantify this. As someone who works in sales for hosted services, I saw this trend emerge virtually overnight with the Snowden leaks - the complete erosion of trust for any service hosted in the U.S., even if the actual, measurable impact to date any of my customers of being spied upon is exactly nil.
Now if only someone would compare the impact to the NSA's operating budget and draw some lines, things might get better. I've been called an optimist before, however.
First we rid ourselves of manufacturing to become a country of services and intellectual property. Then we destroy the reputation of our services by spying on everyone who uses them. Good job government. Good job.
And here's the big-ass BUT, really, DARPA built the Internet. Someone has been spying on some of it all along, most certainly. BUT the level it has risen to with the holy excuse of THA TURRISTS is unexcusable. The Snowden Shaming was long overdue.
Industrial espionage is a big concern. It has been known since at least 2001 (when Echelon was widely covered in the press and the European Parliament opened an investigation) that the NSA has intercepted communications among European companies and then handed over business secrets to their American competitors. Even if it wouldn't protect individuals' privacy, the idea is that a European cloud would protect European businesses.
Countries like France and UK, yeah, absolutely. Germany... is slightly more touchy about issues pertaining to surveillance and the general topic of totalitarianism, for some reason.
Iceland overthrew its government when said government wouldn't jail bankers. If Iceland says they ain't going to spy on people because fuck that, I would lean toward cautiously trusting them.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Pretty much. Governments have long recognized that the existence of a decentralized packet-switched network makes spying on its citizens harder. Therefore, their goal is to break the Internet, splitting it off into lots of little regional networks that don't fully talk to one another, requiring companies to store data on their citizens in country-specific servers so that it is easier to keep track of everything that's happening, etc. Government would love to go all the way back to the circuit-switched days of mainframe computing if they could.
This is why we, as citizens of the world, must unite to demand more reasonable policies, starting with laws that fine companies an exorbitant amount of money for sharing information about their citizens with foreign governments without a warrant from the citizens' governments. If Google were hit with a million dollar fine every time it obeyed an NSL without getting a court order from whatever country the target was from, Google would then be forced to sue the federal government to reclaim those damages, forcing the U.S. government to act like a proper player on the world stage instead of a world-class thug that bullies its way into whatever information it wants.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Yea, we had to have a special network connection through the American Embassy in France so we could exchange e-mail without the French reading the emails. We put it into place when the French would ask about something that was only disclosed in the email.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
And China has been accused of it many, many times - they barely even bother to hide it. Every country does it, then acts outraged when all the others do too.
Will they shutdown the FBI, CIA and NSA? The DHS?
It's not a "Free Country", or even a plausible republic, with Secret Police.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yes, we (the German people) are. No, we (the German government) are not. The later will happily share whatever they acquire with its "friends" in Europe and overseas.
Technically both NSA and BND/Verfassungschutz are not spying on their own people ... but if the BND spies on Americans and the NSA spies on Germans and both swap their findings, all laws were respected.
I'm not making this weird shit up, that's actually how our government argued in this affair. Granted the wording they used was of course more not-so-obvious politian-speak. But that's what they said.
Oh, shit.
Sure every country has a spy group. But every country does not have the SAME spy group. My search engine is in Europe. My e-mail is in Russia. My web site is in Thailand. You think the KGB is going to share data with the NSA? No way.
You use various services on the Internet. Get those services from different companies, different countries. If you use Google for everything, then Google knows everything about you, and Google will tell the NSA. Yandex will not tell the NSA; no way; Yandex is in Moscow. Google's business plan is to become an expert on you, and I don't want ANYBODY to be an expert on me. It's not about who you trust, it's about trusting nobody.
Your point and my point are not really in conflict; they're just two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, the first goal of government, sadly, is and has always been maintaining and concentrating power. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Other governments knowing things about your citizens weakens your own government's power, because those other countries could potentially learn some of your country's secrets. (This is particularly true for business communications.) Your own government knowing things about its citizens increases its power, because it gives them information not only about security threats, but also about potential threats to your power. It also gives them ammunition that they can use for blackmail if they need to silence a dissenter. Therefore, the natural tendency is for a government to want to increase its ability to spy on its citizens while decreasing the ability of other governments to do so. I cite as an example the extensive U.S. government surveillance of people involved in the Occupy movement.
Complete global decentralization, which the Internet typically trends towards in the absence of interference, limits the ability of all governments to spy on anyone. This does not meet the above goals. However, regional centralization (such as EU member governments encouraging people to use servers within the EU) in lieu of global centralization decreases the ability of governments to spy on people from other countries/economic communities, while increasing governments' ability to spy on people in their own countries. This is a win-win for European governments; they get the political win of being able to say that they're protecting people from the watchful eye of the nefarious U.S. government, all the while centralizing that data in a location where it is more easily reachable by their own governments through subpoenas and what not.
This article is a good read on the subject.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.