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."

Comments

But they can't tell you

[bob_super]

"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...

Let's assume for a moment I believe them

[Opportunist]

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 It's not like due process or any outdated junk like that still held a drop of water.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?

Re:Let's assume for a moment I believe them

[drinkypoo]

You don't fight. You go another direction.

You don't fight for commercial products to be free from backdoors. Another regime can always come in and force people to put them in, later. You build a healthy computing ecosystem resistant to back doors. And that means Open Source and Free Software.

Many eyes may not catch all the back doors, but many eyes are still better than only spying eyes.

Fragmenting the internet?

[TubeSteak]

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.

Maybe not the NSA - maybe other agencies

[ron_ivi]

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.

Re:Nothing new for IBM

[HiThere]

Why does it seem far fetched? I don't know that it's true, but I certainly don't find it unlikely. IBM was born out of the US Census (among other factors), and has always had strong ties to the federal government.