Canada Quietly Offering Sanctuary To Data From the US

davecb writes "The Toronto Star's lead article today is Canada courting U.S. web giants in wake of NSA spy scandal, an effort to convince them their customer data is safer here. This follows related moves like Cisco moving R&D to Toronto. Industry Canada will neither confirm nor deny that European and U.S. companies are negotiating to move confidential data away from the U.S. This critically depends on recent blocking legislation to get around cases like U.S. v. Bank of Nova Scotia, where U.S. courts 'extradited' Canadian bank records to the U.S. Contrary to Canadian law, you understand ..."

Comments

Canada is already America's bitch.

[robot_love]

Our banks will release all personal information to US law enforcement, even though this directly contravenes our Constitution.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-banks-to-be-compelled-to-share-clients-info-with-u-s-1.2437975

Re:Canada is already America's bitch.

[MrKevvy]

Canada also assisted the NSA in spying including spying on attendees at the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010.

As this is common knowledge, I'm skeptical that any entity would trust Canada more than the U.S. with its confidential data. I certainly wouldn't.

Re:Crazy

[Nerdfest]

In other countries they must actually do 'spying' though, as opposed to just forcing companies to hand over data under threat.

Totally irrelevant if you're a "US company"...

[BUL2294]

So unless Google, Facebook, and the like are no longer going to be US-based companies (which I doubt will happen, especially given that they are publicly traded), and decide to shut down all operations in the US, things like the Patriot Act & wiretapping laws would still compel these companies to hand over data, despite the data center sitting on Canadian soil--or anywhere else in the world... Remember that Microsoft refused to answer questions about whether law enforcement had backdoors into Skype calls, after M$ picked up Skype. Pre-takeover, when Skype was an Estonian company, US-required backdoors didn't exist & couldn't be compelled, so the NSA had to hack to get the data...