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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.
...it's been done before and didn't work.
"....away from the NSA."
Ha ha ha ha ha, yeah, that was +1, hilarious.
-The NSA
-Styopa
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.
Umm, Ireland isn't in the UK you know ...
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.
Oh, oops. Well, thanks for the correction. :-)
GCHQ has no jurisdiction in Ireland. Different country, not part of the UK and all that.
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.
The NSA isn't supposed to spy on Americans, but if the logs are in Ireland, and are in Ireland _because_ they relate to non-US users, then the NSA is definitely allowed to get them. They can also collect data in transit more freely if both ends are outside the US, or if one end is in Ireland. This looks like a move to give NSA more freedom to spy on European Twitter users by segregating the Americans. Also, if politics in the US goes well, NSA will have less freedom to spy on Americans. This move is bet-hedging: if US politics turn anti-authoritarian, NSA won't lose as much access to Europeans because they'll be better segregated.
To judge this move correctly, you need to list all the forms of government surveillance: what organization is requesting data, why does that organization request it, is it possible to refuse the request. This is all secret, though. It's not even possible to disclose the request. The transparency reports Twitter and Google release aren't detailed enough because the government won't allow them to be, and has structured what they're allowed to release to limit debate on the methods and intentions of the government. The more interesting information requests, like the one Calyx received, have more of the now-standard threat-backed secrecy requirements around them than less interesting requests, so the outliers that should be driving debate are carefully hidden. There's no way for the public to judge the usefulness of what Twitter did. Twitter themselves has a better idea, but still not a very good idea.
I think the Europeans are less rational about this than the Americans.
- they think there's no first-world population-control surveillance in Europe just because their spy agencies haven't had a leaker yet. NSA leaks should tell them how stupid an assumption this is, and they should be embarrassed it took the idealism of an American to expose their own authoritarianism indirectly. Instead, they are like, "oh Americans are so authoritarian. Thank God I'm European." pretty smug, guys.
- they don't make a connection between surveillance and power. For example, NSA spies on Europeans, finds the leaders of a globalization protest movement, shares the information with GCHQ, and the leaders are detained at immigration in London until the protest is over. This is a low-hanging-fruit anti-democratic way that surveillance has been used in the past, and is a task at which bulk surveillance is good because it can reveal the structure of networks (ex. the Paul Revere metadata attack http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ ). But it's the connection between the surveillance and the detention that matters. Instead they're worried abstractly whether they're "watched" or not. Why would an American be worried if the Stasi had a file on them? It's a problem, though, if Stasi shares their files with FBI, which in this case, they do.
- their fears aren't proportionate. For example, some European sysadmins I spoke to fear the FISA court will approve a warrant to collect industrial espionage data through PRISM. Is this possible? Yes: the court is a rubber stamp, and if it weren't a rubber stamp it's also within spy agency skill to ask questions and disguise their goal, ex. "we think this top engineer at Xerox is into child porn so please give us complete copy of his work email." Is the fear proportionate, though? No: US is generally less corrupt than Europe when doing international business, the French in particular are notorious for industrial espionage, and there is a poor match between PRISM and industrial espionage so that US would probably use a different program and method, like exploiting employees' phones and laptops, or bribing emloyees in traditional GRU-style. For the former attack, the European response (self-host everything rather than using Google/MS/etc.) makes them more vulnerable to industrial espionage, not less. However constructing this fear provides a pretense for retaliatory
...China, or maybe Russia ... are nothing more than a 3rd world country trying to hide that fact...
China and Russia adopted the metric systems still in the early 20th century. Printing press, periodical system of elements, space flight, and many other significant humanity-scale scientific and engineering breakthroughs were made in those parts.
By that rationale the CIA has jurisdiction in Beijing.
Jusrisdiction does not mean what you think it means.