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Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

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Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#61

Post by chewxy »

vertis wrote: post #53
jval wrote: post #40

This is a huge deal. I live in Australia and I have been running businesses on the cloud for the last 3 years or so. I have rarely heard the issue of the PATRIOT Act raised and in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted. Those days are most certainly over. This stuff will a…

I'm, also in Australia. NB: It's a real struggle to not make this sound paranoid. Just at an individual level, I'm questioning whether it's wise to store my data in a US service that won't afford me the same protection as US citizens. I've already started reducing my reliance on Google, and I barely use facebook, but things like Amazon and Linode are much harder for me to quickly divorce myself from.

If you're willing to pay a bit more, there are companies like Ninefold

But then again, that is just talk. I still use AWS and Linode religiously. The prices are really hard to beat

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#62

Post by Ankaios »

purephase wrote: post #30

Nothing will change. If you think that those involved were not prepared for the eventually of a leak, you'd be very naive. The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes. Contingency plans have been put in place for this eventuality and the people making these plans are experts at dealing with these situations. My guess is that the gameplan for the US government…

Tomorrow is WWDC and, with the latest Apple news, the tech community rally will likely fall to 2-3 page in a week or so and then disappear altogether.

Perhaps use that to gain more attention. Picket the WWDC.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#63

Post by etherael »

Another data point, I have used a ton of cloud services from US companies in the past with an attitude of not really being comfortable with it based on a belief that something like what was discovered was probably happening but it was just too damned convenient and easy to ignore.

I still made efforts to secure what mattered, like truecrypt containers on dropbox et al, but at the end of the day I just shouldn't have played the game at all. Lending economic support to this kind of behaviour is not acceptable.

I'm conflicted about this because I'm convinced that generally speaking, Dropbox and Google and various other companies that have no other choice than to behave in this way are otherwise really worth supporting.

I am as we speak setting up dedicated hosting with encrypted storage and obfuscated service paths to migrate all my existing services onto something I can reliably control, starting with gmail and dropbox.

I really should have just done this a long time ago, but it becoming abundantly clear that my suspicions were completely justified pushed me over the edge.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#64

Post by jacques_chester »

jval wrote: post #40

This is a huge deal. I live in Australia and I have been running businesses on the cloud for the last 3 years or so. I have rarely heard the issue of the PATRIOT Act raised and in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted. Those days are most certainly over. This stuff will a…

Australia isn't exactly a safe haven. There are only a handful of pipes in and out of the country, each of them probably well within the deep packet inspection capability of serious spy gear. I'd be amazed if one of the AFP, ACC, ASIS, ASIO or DSD didn't have their own rooms in selected Telstra and Optus facilities.

And not to mention that Conroy wants to do something like what the NSA are supposedly doing; he's just going to outsource it to the ISPs.

I've seen an AFP server in a certain government datacentre. Its security was a square of black and yellow tape and the assurance that I would be detained without charge under anti-terrorism legislation if I crossed the tape to take a closer look.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#65

Post by taspeotis »

jval wrote: post #40

This is a huge deal. I live in Australia and I have been running businesses on the cloud for the last 3 years or so. I have rarely heard the issue of the PATRIOT Act raised and in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted. Those days are most certainly over. This stuff will a…

Australian here. Government departments are slowly starting to catch on to this sort of thing.

One application I work on stores data from DEEWR and FaHCSIA and this year they've "cracked down" on that data going overseas.

The application's data (and the bits we get back from the government) has always been stored in Australia on our hardware. My understanding is that some of our competitors using AWS and Rackspace had to work hard to quickly get their stuff hosted locally (or are in the process of bringing it back here).

You can get an idea of what DEEWR expects providers using cloud services to adhere to from here: http://foi.deewr.gov.au/documents/policy-use-cloud-hosted-so...

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#66

Post by sdkmvx »

rayiner wrote: post #50
danenania wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collusion among private corporations is scary, but it's not as scary as totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide. The precedents set for what governments end up doing once they get their hands on this level of social control are very bleak.

The amount you should reasonably be worried about something happening is the probability of the event multiplied by how bad that event would be. Government gone totally off the rails would be much worse, of course, but corporations going off the rails is much more likely. How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide? I don't see a lot of exam…

> How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide?

How many 200 year old liberal democracies can you point to? There's no historical data to look at. This history of the United States itself is an indicator that democracy is self-defeating. Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested.

> It's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.

It's also not rational to give the government a free pass. Don't think that companies can collude with each other. The government can also collude with companies, as PRISM indicates that they have been doing.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#67

Post by bdcravens »

qntmfred wrote: post #4

No I don't think Obama did anything.

A core principle of politics is that you're responsible for everything that happens on your watch. If you don't believe that, go listen to the past 40 years of broadcasted debates, and count the number of things that the opponent didn't personally do but was called to account for.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#68

Post by a3n »

ritchiea wrote: post #31

One biggie that the author left out of the piece: The US Gov continues to insist that they are not monitoring the data of US citizens because that would be unconstitutional without warrants. But that's a tacit admission that they are openly monitoring the data of non-US citizens. I think this is one of the most important revelations of this leak, the US Gov has made it clear that if you are a non US citizen using a w…

I don't expect non-Americans to be all that familiar with my country, and vice versa.

But think about it. The NSA has been around since 1952. They now have N billions of dollars of black budget. The relevant Congressional oversight committees are prohibited from talking about what they learn. They are (supposedly) constitutionally prohibited from spying on Americans. If they aren't (or say the aren't) spying on Americans, then they're spying on y'all.

Some of it, plus the rest of it, equals all of it. We're some of it. Venn says y'all are the rest of it.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#69

Post by greendestiny »

jacques_chester wrote: post #64
jval wrote: post #40

This is a huge deal. I live in Australia and I have been running businesses on the cloud for the last 3 years or so. I have rarely heard the issue of the PATRIOT Act raised and in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted. Those days are most certainly over. This stuff will a…

Australia isn't exactly a safe haven. There are only a handful of pipes in and out of the country, each of them probably well within the deep packet inspection capability of serious spy gear. I'd be amazed if one of the AFP, ACC, ASIS, ASIO or DSD didn't have their own rooms in selected Telstra and Optus facilities. And not to mention that Conroy wants to do something like what the NSA are supposedly doing; he's just…

But as an Australian citizen we have our courts and public opinion to try and fight for us. Not to mention the people doing the snooping have far less incentive to pass commercial information along to a competitor.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#70

Post by jacques_chester »

ritchiea wrote: post #31

One biggie that the author left out of the piece: The US Gov continues to insist that they are not monitoring the data of US citizens because that would be unconstitutional without warrants. But that's a tacit admission that they are openly monitoring the data of non-US citizens. I think this is one of the most important revelations of this leak, the US Gov has made it clear that if you are a non US citizen using a w…

They'll be doing something like the old Echelon trick.

US spy agencies can't spy on Americans, so they spy on Australians, Canadians and Britons. In return, Australians spy on Americans, Britons on Canadians etc etc. Then they swap intelligence and get to claim that "we didn't spy, it was given to us by our allies who are under no such regulations".

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