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Europe Frightened By US 'Cloud Act', Fearing National Security Risks (straitstimes.com)
"A foreign power with possible unbridled access to Europe's data is causing alarm in the region. No, it's not China. It's the U.S.," writes Bloomberg (in an article shared by hackingbear).
"As the U.S. pushes ahead with the 'Cloud Act' it enacted about a year ago, Europe is scrambling to curb its reach." Under the act, all U.S. cloud service providers, from Microsoft and IBM to Amazon -- when ordered -- have to provide American authorities with data stored on their servers, regardless of where it's housed. With those providers controlling much of the cloud market in Europe, the act could potentially give the US the right to access information on large swaths of the region's people and companies.
The U.S. says the act is aimed at aiding investigations. But some people are drawing parallels between the legislation and the National Intelligence Law that China put in place in 2017 requiring all its organisations and citizens to assist authorities with access to information. The Chinese law, which the US says is a tool for espionage, is cited by President Donald Trump's administration as a reason to avoid doing business with companies like Huawei Technologies. "I don't mean to compare US and Chinese laws, because obviously they aren't the same, but what we see is that on both sides, Chinese and American, there is clearly a push to have extraterritorial access to data," said Ms Laure de la Raudiere, a French lawmaker who co-heads a parliamentary cyber-security and sovereignty group. "This must be a wake up call for Europe to accelerate its own, sovereign offer in the data sector."
"As the U.S. pushes ahead with the 'Cloud Act' it enacted about a year ago, Europe is scrambling to curb its reach." Under the act, all U.S. cloud service providers, from Microsoft and IBM to Amazon -- when ordered -- have to provide American authorities with data stored on their servers, regardless of where it's housed. With those providers controlling much of the cloud market in Europe, the act could potentially give the US the right to access information on large swaths of the region's people and companies.
The U.S. says the act is aimed at aiding investigations. But some people are drawing parallels between the legislation and the National Intelligence Law that China put in place in 2017 requiring all its organisations and citizens to assist authorities with access to information. The Chinese law, which the US says is a tool for espionage, is cited by President Donald Trump's administration as a reason to avoid doing business with companies like Huawei Technologies. "I don't mean to compare US and Chinese laws, because obviously they aren't the same, but what we see is that on both sides, Chinese and American, there is clearly a push to have extraterritorial access to data," said Ms Laure de la Raudiere, a French lawmaker who co-heads a parliamentary cyber-security and sovereignty group. "This must be a wake up call for Europe to accelerate its own, sovereign offer in the data sector."
America has NO RIGHT doing this. It was what Russia did within USSR and CHina does. Now, we are becoming no different than other dictatorial nations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Isn't this in combination with the GDPR just going to make it plain illegal for European data controllers to put their data on US owned servers?
So, just make it impossible for even the vendor to read the (unencrypted) data. The most the vendor could do is hand over encrypted data, leaving authorities to try to decrypt it without the key. Or try to force the owner to give up the key.
One such new offering is IBM Hyper Protect DBAAS:
Hyper Protect DBaaS: the evolution of cloud databases
Getting started with IBM Cloud Hyper Protect DBaaS
BTW, this doesn't run on Intel hardware. It runs on IBM Z hardware, on dedicated cores per instance, which should minimize the potential for Spectre-type attacks.
IBM is rolling this out aggressively. How aggressively?
For now, they are handing out well-provisioned Postgres (8G memory, 80G data) and MongoDB (8G memory, 40G data) experimental instances for free.
Only reason I am not taking them up on this is that I know we won't be able to afford the price, once it is not free. I'll stick with out 1G memory Databases for PostgreSql instance for our little educational app.
Hyper Protect DBaaS (pricing)
Not an IBM shill. Just happy to not be drinking the AWS kool aid.