US Government's Failure To Protect Public Privacy Is Driving Business Overseas
from the all-for-what? dept
As we've covered over and over again, the US government has made it clear that it wants access to your data. With things like the FISA Amendments Act, ECPA and various other laws, law enforcement plays the FUD card repeatedly, insisting that it needs to be able to go in and see data to "protect" the public. There's very little basis to make this claim. And, worse, by decimating online privacy, the US government may actively be driving business outside of the US to foreign countries that have stricter privacy laws that actually protect data from government snooping.Many foreign companies are converging toward a common argument for why they’re better than their American competitors. It’s not that the foreign-made technology is better, more resilient, or more ubiquitous, nor that the foreign companies are more innovative or better managed. They compare not their businessmen but their politicians. They argue simply that American laws undermine any American product — that these laws fail to protect privacy of personal or business information of all users. This argument works partly because consumers claim to “avoid doing business” with companies they don’t trust to protect their privacy.Basically, because law enforcement believes it needs to build a much bigger haystack as it searches for needles, we're handing other countries a key selling point in setting up services to compete with US services: "you can't trust any service based in the US, because it's subject to government surveillance." That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I know I've see a number of companies lately who advertise the fact that they're not based in the US to suggest that they're more secure and can keep your data private. This is not the reputation the US needs or wants right now.
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Filed Under: 4th amendment, economic impact, ecpa, ecpa reform, fisa, privacy, us government
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At the moment, the fearful aspect is winning, and they have a right to be afraid, as the government is turning, inch-by-inch, into a corrupt parody of its earlier ideals. This is becoming more apparent in games such as Bioshock Infinite exploring this theme in the city of Columbia within the game (amongst other things).
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* rolls eyes *
If you want to see worldwide government corruption in action in a game, at least play a real man's game: Deus Ex.
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One day they all will get what they truly deserve !
Taken right out of History Books..............The inevitable will happen this Century some time.
Greedbags better watch out cause you will not be treated nicely.
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Oh, the irony. Like you have a substantial basis upon which you make yours, FUD Boy.
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Actually, yes. How many times has Mike posted case files here on Techdirt, and provided links to court documents, so that we can read for ourselves?
You, "good sire", are LYING.
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You said that Mike DOESN'T review court documents. He does. All the time.
Now, Mike is using logic here, a thought process where he determines that if Person A is doing Action B, then more than likely, it will lead to Result C. He sees the actions the US government has taken (censorship, ignoring FOIA requests, demanding access to data (Skype et al)) and quite reasonably thought out a result: companies that want to retain customers (customers who DO NOT WANT governments having access to their data) will move overseas. Mike figures this out by reviewing all the data that is available.
Now, if Mike is somehow wrong and the US government is actually planning something benign with all of this, then Mike is NOT at fault for coming to the wrong conclusion. He was given inaccurate data.
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Care to actually discuss the topic in the article?
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more and more information does not = pertinent or useful information.
Simply going "give us all the information you have" means you have even more information to go through to find whatever you're looking for, no matter how it is organized.
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That's not how it's done these days. Now, it's slurp down *all* the data, then mine it at your leisure. The NSA even uses this to get around your Fourth (?) Amendment; as long as they haven't looked at it *yet*, they haven't *really* received it.
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The joke is on them. The NSA is spying on all of the foreign companies too.
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In the current US administration, they just don't want to take the chance that some politician will order a hit on them as a favor to one of his buddies. Better to set up shop where there's a little more separation between corporation and state.
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America = #1 in Freedom! America told me!
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"This is not the reputation the US needs or wants right now."
"This argument works partly because consumers claim to “avoid doing business” with companies they don’t trust to protect their privacy." -- EXACTLY. Hence Google's alleged "don't be evil" motto; given its massive ability to track and collate (900,000 servers on giant farms), its first goal is to appear open and friendly, giving away helpful "free" services, but not identifying individuals.
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Re: "This is not the reputation the US needs or wants right now."
"The child must exhibit 4 out of the 8 signs and symptoms listed below in order to meet the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic threshold for oppositional defiant disorder[8]
Actively refuses to comply with majority's requests or consensus-supported rules[9]
Performs actions to deliberately annoy others[9]
Angry and resentful of others[7]
Argues often[7]
Blames others for his or her own mistakes[10]
Often loses temper[10]
Spiteful or seeks revenge[10]
Touchy or easily annoyed[10]
"
All of that can be applied to you.
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Re: Re: "This is not the reputation the US needs or wants right now."
Would you prefer he went back to marking emphasis /like this/? ;-)
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Catch Up
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Spying
If you are on claimed US land then you are under US law and then there resides no data that they wont poke their nose through.
Companies have an obligation to protect their customer privacy and the US Administration likes to misuse the law in that they can spy on everyone and everything without even bothering to get a Court Order.
So I only await that one big case that makes this all painfully obvious to everyone. The General Petraeus case comes close on that one being a total privacy violation when no law was broken.
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Maybe it's a good cover for tax avoidance
I think private companies totally pull the strings on what the government does with data. There are contracts to sell to government.
So if we don't want government poking around in private data, we might start with what data private companies collect, how private company funding influences politics, and so on.
Let's follow the money.
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Re: Maybe it's a good cover for tax avoidance
Why decide that taxes are paid poorly when the regulation of them had been shoddy as well?
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Re: Re: Maybe it's a good cover for tax avoidance
Well, yes. I'd prefer a total overhaul of the US tax system. And I advocate for lots of reform all across the government and economic system.
One reason I think we have to look at things differently now is that there are massive environmental impacts that we can't run away from. In the past, if people screwed up one area, they could move to another. Now that we are so interconnected, we've got to find solutions that require some level of cooperation or we need to find solutions that work even when people's poor decisions don't contribute to the common good.
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Re: Re: Re: Maybe it's a good cover for tax avoidance
Currently, I would say more coo-ops and mincome (minimal income) perfects would work instead of raising taxes and cutting spending, but that's just me.
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If only
It would be better if they were only decimating online (well let's be honest, ALL) privacy instead of obliterating it.
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I moved
One of the domains I host and operate is for an annual music festival and the chance of it being taken down for some bullshit reason was not worth the limited advantage of using US based servers.
Having said all that, things are not going a lot better here in Canada under the current government. :-(
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also moved.
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Gee, I wonder why
And it doesn't help that some companies are bending over backwards to provide governments with customer's data.
Case in point, companies state in their FUCKING TERMS OF SERVICE that they have the the right to scan content uploaded to their cloud backup service for things like child porn. This is part of their privacy policy.
Exhibit A: Verizon.
The fact that the terms & conditions of the cloud backup service, which most people assume are private, explicitly allowing them to scan the stuff you upload to their cloud for things you shouldn't have legally (see: child porn), kinda files in the face of basic idea of privacy.
[the info about Verizon this sort of thing popped up early last month on Ars: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/how-verizon-found-a-child-pornographer-in-its- cloud/ ]
So yeah, no surprise that companies have started moving overseas. If some companies/the US government are barely attempting to pay lipservice to the concept of privacy anymore, then companies are going to want to move to places that have more respect for privacy.
How long before Congress gets the memo that they're hurting their economy by driving businesses overseas by letting the FBI et al do surveillance for extremely vague "security reasons"?
The Zen Master says, "We'll see."
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Re: Gee, I wonder why
But some countries have much stricter privacy laws than the US. They have laws that limit what companies can collect and monitor in the first place.
What I complain about are companies that want to collect all the data they want and to sell it to whomever they want, but then they yell "privacy" about the government. They don't really believe in privacy because they are making money by invading it. It's a double standard for profit.
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Make privacy the default standard
Usually the argument goes that if you don't want to be monitored, don't use these services. But how about we change the nature of online usage so that no monitoring happens in the first place? Now, wouldn't that be revolutionary?
Ultimately we're either going toward a world where everything is viewable by everyone and there will be no need for government to be singled out because they will have the same access as everyone else. Or we'll find ways to live our lives as anonymously as possible and everything will be engineered to hide whatever we don't want known.
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No, this is not exaggeration. Since the Patriot Act it is a recurring theme in IT circles around here that the main argument against going into the cloud with any business related data is: you cannot avoid US companies with absolute certainty, and any involvement of a US company compromises data security because of the US laws.
It is THE main reason to avoid the cloud in anything business related. To be able to contractually provide that no US based company will be involved is not a mere competetive advantage, it is the prerequisite to be allowed to even compete at all.
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Ess, C. (2010). Digital media ethics. Polity Pr.
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Exactly. Why would anyone assume that governments wouldn't use the same tools available to everyone else? The more sophisticated technology gets, the more sophisticated government tracking gets (or should get -- I'm not sure governments are as up to speed as private companies are).
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