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Twitter Moves Non-US Accounts To Ireland, and Away From the NSA

Posted by timothy on from the be-right-over-here-guys dept.

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.

6 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Except... by GoddersUK · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...it's been done before and didn't work.

  2. Really? by argStyopa · · Score: 5, Funny

    "....away from the NSA."

    Ha ha ha ha ha, yeah, that was +1, hilarious.

    -The NSA

    --
    -Styopa
  3. This Probably Won't Work... by NicBenjamin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

  4. Get out of Dodge by tomhath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nothing more than a tax dodge with good PR spin.

    1. Re:Get out of Dodge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yep, Ireland is a favourite country for shuffling money through to avoid paying tax, to the point where this sort of corporate structure even has its own wikipedia page.

  5. Technically, probably not a good move to dodge NSA by ashpool7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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