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Twitter Moves Non-US Accounts To Ireland, and Away From the NSA
Mark Wilson writes Twitter has updated its privacy policy, creating a two-lane service that treats U.S. and non-U.S. users differently. If you live in the U.S., your account is controlled by San Francisco-based Twitter Inc, but if you're elsewhere in the world (anywhere else) it's handled by Twitter International Company in Dublin, Ireland. The changes also affect Periscope. What's the significance of this? Twitter Inc is governed by U.S. law; it is obliged to comply with NSA-driven court requests for data. Data stored in Ireland is not subject to the same obligation. Twitter is not alone in using Dublin as a base for non-U.S. operations; Facebook is another company that has adopted the same tactic. The move could also have implications for how advertising is handled in the future.
That's great and all, but it doesn't change the fact that pretty much every tweet out there is total crap. By its very nature of rapid information flow, even the most worthwhile tweet is quickly (within seconds!) eclipsed by shitty tweets, and quickly is long forgotten.
If you are worried about privacy why are you using Twitter at all? The mind boggles.
The NSA doesn't have jurisdiction over twitter because some complicated rule of international legal procedure says it does, it has jurisdiction in the US because US Courts can order US Cops to arrest the Twitter employees who refuse to hand them information. Microsoft has tried this, and while I don't think they've officially lost yet, it's very difficult for me to see a reason for them to win. The Constitution is silent on the matter of what happens when Court Orders affect people in other countries, which means there's absolutely no reason for them to give a shit about jurisdiction. In fact in several cases the US has sent Agents into foreign countries secretly, arrested/spied upon/etc. private citizens against the laws of those countries, and when they've gotten back to the US the Courts have said "great, the bad guy's fucked, when can you arrange a chump public defender so we can schedule the execution?"
OTOH, it's likely this is all PR because European customers live in places where the Constitution spends a half-goddamn page describing the precise geographic limits of it's jurisdiction. They don't understand that a) when our Constitution was written a good 90% of the land mass of the US was somebody else's, b) no we did not amend the damn thing with the Gadsden Purchase, and c) the whole damn thing's supposed to be on a single page.
It's also an interesting defense of their Irish tax strategy. "Of course we pay the ridiculously low Irish tax rate. We'd pay the US Tax Rate, but the NSA Gestapo would demand access to our servers."
Nothing more than a tax dodge with good PR spin.
A secret agency like the NSA does not need to be well-managed, because everything it does can be hidden.
A good indication of the quality control of the NSA is that Snowden, an employee of a contractor, was able to steal a huge amount of data.
That is an entirely orthoganal issue. Poster was conflating UK and RoI, GCHQ and G2. These are simple factual errors and unrelated to any speculation about activities that national security services engage in OUTSIDE their own sovereign states. Now go and put your tin foil hat back on.
If we pretend that laws mean something...
then they would be *safer* here in the USA where the NSA is not allowed to spy on them, because it's
A: in the USA (FBI territory, right?)
B: whoever it is would need a warrant.
Now, the NSA can do whatever they want, because they're completely
A: outside of the USA
B: totally foreign SIGINT
The beer may have been better over there 30 years ago, but there's no way that's true now. In most places in the US you can't swing a dead cat without hitting half a dozen craft brewers making outstanding beer. You literally can't sample what's available in liquor stores fast enough and a lot of it is really good.
I don't know if this is a trend that has been embraced by Ireland or not, but I would imagine that in many Irish brands suffer from what many "traditional" European beer brands are no different than most American beer brands -- owned by conglomerates, brewed on industrial scales. Maybe it makes you feel more exclusive to drink Harp over Buweiser, but I'm pretty sure its moslty psychological.