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Microsoft Opens Up Azure Cloud in Germany Even It Can't Access (windowsitpro.com)
Reader v3rgEz writes: International customers are becoming increasingly concerned about the U.S.'s data snooping practices, and it appears Microsoft has devised a solution to make them happy: Set up Azure cloud in a foreign region. Because it's under the technical ownership of a German company named Deutsche Telekom, even Microsoft doesn't have access to the data. The move is not surprising, but it could set a precedent that encourages others to move their corporate data away from U.S. shores to countries that take a friendlier view of encryption and data privacy. From the official blog post, "Microsoft has -- in this new model -- no rights at all to access customer data. Only for special purpose like a support call from a customer a temporary access will be granted by the Data Trustee to the Microsoft engineer, and only for the specified area. After that time (using a technology similar to what you might know as JIT) all access is revoked automatically. So to repeat: Access is granted to the Microsoft engineer only by the Data Trustee. Microsoft has no way to grant that access to itself."
Or they could just barter intelligence deals with German intelligence to have *them* hand over the information directly.
These are government intelligence agencies here. The NSA certainly could social engineer themselves the information, or induce faults on a case by case basis, but why do that when you can just cut a deal or two? The NSA has so much juicy information that German intelligence would be happy to trade for.
Sorry, what? German intelligence would never do that? Yes... sorry... I'm not laughing, that's just a lot of coughing. That's the ticket.
tnk1, I'm inclined to think that the worm has turned in Germany. Exposure of spying by the US on the Chancellor and other high government officials has poisoned the well. It would be a political death sentence for any politician or government employee who was caught helping the US spy on Germans.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The point is to put the servers under the control of the government which is deemed more trustworthy by the customers. And it doesn't even have to be all or most customers - just a subset. Say, those in EU.
Hopefully, there will be more similar centers opening in other countries in the future, so that customers can actually shop around, and pick the country with surveillance laws and/or track record that they're most comfortable with.