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IBM Distances Itself From the NSA and Its Spy Activities
An anonymous reader writes "NSA surveillance has raised concerns among customers globally about the safety of their data from U.S. government spying. More organizations, companies and countries are looking for ways to distant themselves from the NSA activities to safeguard the information of internet users. IBM is the latest to fall into the category of companies that do not want to be associated with the NSA spy activities."
Are they also stopping donations to politicians who support the NSA activity?
"IBM promised to challenge the U.S national security via court procedures if ordered to provide information and data from an enterprise client through a gag order which prohibits them from discussing the order with the client."
Sure, I've got THOUSANDS of lawsuits already in secret court against the big bad abusive government!
Nope, can't give you details. It's secret, you know.
Just trust me...
Regarding World War II and Hitler, their spokesperson said "I know NOTHING!"
Because it's, frankly, moot whether they tell the truth or whether they're lying through their teeth. The moment the US government says "gimme", they'll have to roll over. It's not like due process or any outdated junk like that still held a drop of water.
It's nothing personal, nothing "evil", just business. The government wants something from us, we could fight it but the outcome will be that we hand over what they want, we have higher expenses and we have a government grumpy at us that can make our life miserable so... why bother fighting?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe IBM's sponsor is GHCQ.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The owners of Slashdot fully expect, within five years, anyone who refers to the facts revealed by Snowden to be safely labelled as a "tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theory nutcase" in shill comments exploiting the goldfish-like memory of the sheeple.
Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Facebook, IBM et al are all preparing for that day. They LIE. They are TOLD to lie by the US government. They have full and total immunity over ANY lies they tell in the name of 'national security'.
So, of course they tell you they didn't co-operate with the NSA, aren't co-operating with the NSA, and even if they had, and are now, won't be doing it in the future. This is how stupid they, and the owners of Slashdot think you are.
Organisations like IBM don't give the NSA 100% co-operation. That would imply they just do as the NSA ask. NO! -companies like IBM are pro-active in specifically designing systems in the hope they will prove useful to future NSA full surveillance operations, making the situation far, far worse than mere co-operation by request. These companies compete with one another to INNOVATE such useful NSA functionality, that the NSA uses more of their methods in their spying than those of the other companies.
If IBM has a problem, it is that it CANNOT compete with Microsoft, Google and Facebook in usefulness to the NSA.
IBM didn't have anything bad to say about the NSA until they got passed over for a 300 million dollar contract for a secret database of American's private details. Now that they lost out they found a sense of civic duty? On the other hand...what if they lost the contract because the NSA knew about these lawsuits?
After giving Gates the rights to ms-dos.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Any detail on the use of IBM "trusted" fabs for NSA ASICs ?
Global companies spend just as much time and effort spying via metadata, etc., not to mention spying on employees. There is no regulation on spying by the private sector.
Among the countries, Brazil has considered asking service providers to hold data within the country, a move that Google describes as potentially Fragmenting the internet.
How does that fragment the internet?
Forcing service providers to build infrastructure in-country doesn't fragment anything except Google's business model.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
... they are tied to a country which government can require them to put backdoors in software and hardware, and not to tell anyone about that. The only way to really get clean is really open the source/specifications of everything (including propietary firmware) and let people, companies and countries really be able to check that claims. Until then, you can't decide whether they are telling the truth or not. We already learned what happens when you put blind trust in something even bigger than IBM.
And even if we did, it's classified and we couldn't tell you anyway.
but it's backed by Global Services monitoring on whatever island is above water this afternoon
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
apparently there is only one way to distance yourself from the NSA and it's to cross the border? IBM is going to another country?
When a company would rather work with Nazis than the NSA.
still cash the checks? I think they will and still are.
Considering how closely they partner with Lenovo, I'm not sure the US government are the backdoors in IBM people should be most worried about.
no seriously, go read IBM And the Holocaust, and see that this kind of thing is part of their corporate culture.
That was for the CIA, not the NSA. Maybe you think they're all the same anyway, but at least get your facts straight.
Because most modern countries among them Brazil, France, the UK don't even have these paper protections and they operate security agencies which are OFFICIALLY unaccountable except to the person of the President or PM. So sure, make yourself feel better that the big bad old USA is horrid. Except of course all the others are as bad or worse.
With NSL's and the mandatory gag order....
96 terabytes of extreme, harmful, sheer, blatant, repulsive, arrogant stupidity. Way to go, NetScout. Our Westford friends ushering in a bizarro world, staffed by big data trolls, speeding past Orwell into Kafka. Only the trolls are too stupid to know what that means. Good luck, IBM, trying to distance yourself. As a bulwark of cigar-stinking suits protecting the new American corporate fascism against common decency and common sense, it will be like water distancing itself from wet.
With the "Proclamations of Emperor Obama This Day" 'sanctioning' Russian and Crimea Nationals [He does not have any legal statue for that!] Mr. Obama become the ASS HOLE of Earth, the CLOWN of Earth, the IDIOT of the United States of America.
What a Hawaiian Stoner Lozer Obama is.
Once again, in good English, please. You'll never get a job as a real journalist. How did you ever make it through school?
" distant themselves from the NSA activities "
They are distancing themselves from spying and data archiving and analysis yet they created and marketed a platform called i2 that does just that, which they sell to international cities as part of their smarter cities initiative.
At this time, I am sure that IBM has been helping the Chinese and Indian gov.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
IBM during World War II