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Eric Schmidt: To Avoid NSA Spying, Keep Your Data In Google's Services
jfruh writes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference on surveillance at the Cato Institute that Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA spying shocked the company's engineers — who then immediately started working on making the company's servers and services more secure. Now, after a year and a half of work, Schmidt says that Google's services are the safest place to store your sensitive data.
They will be immediately forced to hand over everything and be silent about it.
Until US laws are fixed AND respected, data going to a US Corporation can by definition not be safe.
Thus far, the most popular way for companies to circumvent this pressure is to try and design encryption systems where they (the corporation) do not hold the ability to decrypt user data.
At that point, law enforcement can ask all they want, legally or otherwise.
(I give this circumvention tactic about another 17 seconds before it is deemed a "terrorist loophole" by the government, so IF you find it, enjoy it while it lasts.)
Google is investing massively abroad, such as in Zurich, Switzerland, where privacy laws are especially strong. Expect that if US laws continue to have negative effects on Google income, the company is going to be more and more international.
can discredit anything and everything you have ever said before publicly. then again, i wonder if it's reached the point of kabuki theatre such that he's trying to deliberately be ridiculous to communicate in the only way he can. kind of like when a hostage deliberately oversells his 'newfound devotion' to his captors' cause to try and communicate that there's a gun pointed at his head.
Actually it's not. If they really wanted to, they can still access it. It's just much more expensive to do so because they would need to send a team to monitor your movements, figure out when you are not home, break in, copy and analyze at HO.
That is assuming your hardware such as keyboard and mouse was not already compromised and already sending data back wireless to them.....
They are quite good at what they do, they have been at it for a long time and got all the angles covered.
We, as a people, can only defend ourselves by keeping the cost of monitoring all of us prohibitively expensive....
It's worse than most people seem to realise. Schmidt isn't just lying, he's willingly getting Google in deeper with the NSA because, you know, the bottom line: It's very, very profitable (tax payers dollars are always the most profitable source) and the market insists that corporations go where the money is. Google appear to be doing everything they can to get into the international espionage business via their departments like "Google Ideas", which is effectively a department within the US State Department. They consult with governments and corporations to help them with their commercial and political "issues." You know, the kinds of issues that some governments and corporations don't like, such as popular protest movements, environmental campaigning, human rights protection and enforcement, exposing political corruption, etc. Google can provide such governments and corporations with very helpful data on who these "trouble makers" are, where they've been, who they've talked to, and what they may be planning to do next.
Perhaps we should be more insistent when interviewing Schmidt about our data: Is it safe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I mean, it's the kind of thing that he's endorsing, enabling, and promoting by getting into bed with the current NSA, CIA, DoJ, and State Department. It's only fair that he should be treated equally.
The cloud is more than just storage, but usually people use the storage functionality for this.
Realistically, the cloud needs to be treated as another storage medium, just like optical, tape, floppy disks, HDDs, SSDs, and everything else. You plan for media failure, and you build in anti-compromise measures.
The cloud is the same way. If you are an enterprise, you turn on encryption in NetBackup or other program, create a storage pool, and have a mirror on other media (be it an Avamar, a tier 3 disk, or a LTO-6 silo.)
If you are a home user, you encrypt your cloud backups, either by storing things in an encrypted container (TrueCrypt, BitLocker protected windows image, Mac Disk Image, LUKS, PGP Disk volume, etc.), or using a backup program that encrypts. At the worst, there are utilities like BoxCryptor which act similar to CryptFS and map an encrypted layer on top of the cloud drives. Any of this is better than nothing.
Of course, with encryption comes the major bugaboo -- key management. You may have the data securely stashed on the cloud... but without keys, it will be inaccessible. I like having several printed out physical notebook with keys in it, as well as archive grade optical media, and a USB flash drive. Each copy of the notebook goes with a key person (corporate officer), and there is one kept in the local tape safe. This way, if the data center gets completely flattened, it may take days to weeks, but data is still recoverable. This also helps if there is an audit or motion of discovery.
The cloud has its big issues... but treat it as its own piece of media, and it can come in handy. To be more specific, treat each cloud offering as its own media. Amazon Glacier is great for long term archiving, but one needs to well index it, to minimize the stuff retrieved, and Glacier should be the absolute last resort if data is needed, due to the charges for fetching data.
For the purposes of the US legal system, every person and corporation is American.
For the purposes of the Constitution, none are.
While the major providers can't talk about it, not all gov't requests get served. The point is that yes, there is always that possibility that your account gets handed a request, but at least with Google services, you won't get picked up in random dragnet-style surveillance. That's difficult to claim for all the other major providers, and is precisely what Eric Schmidt is claiming.
at this point we should be storming the Pentagon / White House / Senate en masse to demand and take real freedom. There is no terrorist threat that actually warrants this level of intrusion, our own police seem to be better at killing defenceless citizens than terrorists anyway over the last year.
The problem is that most Americans are perfectly happy with the police acting this way. Yes, there's a minority of Americans who are outraged, but most of them thing it's just fine. Just look at the online comments any time one of these incidents happens; most Americans think the victim got what he deserved.