Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

linkedin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 291 posts

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

#81

Post by eksith »

jmtame wrote: post #22
eksith wrote: post #3

No, because only those who were on the fence were swayed either way. As of right now, the Poll on how the HN community will respond ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846564 ) is at : No, I'm ok with it 66 I'd like to do something but it's too difficult to avoid using cloud services 195 I'm going to try to use services from non-US companies hosted outside the US 99 I'm only going to use services that allow clien…

From the article you linked to: "With the latest revelations just days – in some cases, hours – old, it’s too soon to know for sure." I think it's still too early and I'd wait until all the facts are out. I can't speak for how people in other countries are feeling, but I can say this... As an American startup founder, I'd be very worried about what my international customers would think if they knew I was working sec…

True. We know so far that they've limited the original PRISM scope to major infrastructure providers and social media. This is obvious since that would cast the widest net.

As a startup founder, if your operation does get popular enough to catch the eye of the NSA, realistically there's absolutely nothing you can do to fight it. That's how far ingrained the instruments of our own deconstruction are. And they're buried in plain sight in U.S. law. I don't see that changing overnight with a few amendments or acts introduced here and there. It would take an overhaul of the very principles of government we've taken for granted (and quite possibly never really existed).

The fact that we're aware of this aspect of hopelessness will, in the end, be far more damaging to the U.S. economy than any foreign entities being aware of it.

After all, why would American founders found and base anything on U.S. territory if they cannot do it freely and on their own terms? They'd rather found a startup in Hong Kong.

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

#82

Post by lawnchair_larry »

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…

I think the issue for foreign governments is closer to countries not wanting other countries to have easy reach into their data. For them it's not a civil liberties issue, it's a security issue.

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

#83

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

Nothing new at all, history just repeating itself. Everything mentioned in this article was already assumed by people. I did laugh when they aid we don't do domestic spying. I think they don't know in US how many people in the world are living outside the all mighty US. Maybe it's just bad geography and limited national political thinking.

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

#84

Post by lawnchair_larry »

hemancuso wrote: post #57
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…

Agreed. I am surprised that Amazon, Rackspace et. al. aren't coming out and letting their customers know where they stand in all of this.

You shouldn't be surprised about Amazon. They pulled the plug on wikileaks as a favor, and they give the CIA their own private $600M cloud:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/03/21/amazo...

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

#85

Post by greendestiny »

jacques_chester wrote: post #76
greendestiny wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure I follow you. Americans are, theoretically, in a much stronger position vs NSA snooping. US law is meant to make it illegal for their spy agencies to look inwards and the US Constitution has its famous "search and seizure" clause which can, if you find the right judge, have some formidable teeth. As Australian citizens we have no such protections and we have no standing in US courts to get any restitutio…

In the same way that Americans are in a stronger position vs NSA snooping Australians are in a stronger position vs our own snooping.

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

#87

Post by ashray »

dsowers wrote: post #75
zainny wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Australian, that's what I found most interesting as well about all the commentary going on. From the perspective of the NSA it seems my data is fair game under any and all circumstances. Well fuck that. Google, Amazon, et al. - I'm out

Good luck. I don't see other countries innovating at even half the rate of the U.S. with tech stuff. Leaving the umbrella will be like turning out the lights. It gets boring and cold in the dark after a while.

That's possibly because of a few advantages that US companies had due to quicker exposure to leading edge technology. However, when privacy becomes a unique selling point that US corporations can no longer provide - suddenly the competition will see a reason to appear.

I'm on the lookout for reasonably good Google apps alternatives, if they don't exist right now - this is a time that a solid market just got created. I'm sure someone out there will be interested in making it happen!

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

#88

Post by rayiner »

sdkmvx wrote: post #66
rayiner wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested.

You mean in 1800 when the Alien and Sedition Acts were in force and the government didn't even have to come up with some pretense and prosecuted and convicted people directly for what they said in the press? I don't think the U.S. circa 2000 suffers for that comparison! If you want to talk about which is a more free society, the U.S. in 1800 or the U.S. in 2000, you also can't leave women and blacks (combined more than 50% of the population!) out of the equation...

It's ahistorical to pretend that the U.S. has only gotten less free over time. Vis-a-vis "classical liberalism" the government claimed the power to regulate all interstate commerce in 1824--the only difference today is that you can't even buy a candy bar at a vending machine without engaging in an interstate commercial transaction. If you live today the way the vast majority of the population lived in 1800 (on a farm growing food for your own consumption and sewing your own clothes, etc), you'd probably find that government doesn't reach your activities appreciably more today than it did 200 years ago.

It's also ahistorical to pretend that our rights are universally weaker than they were in 1800. Remember, at that time, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. The liberal Supreme Courts of the 1960's and 1970's dramatically strengthened due process rights and habeas rights relative to what they were before. First Amendment rights are dramatically stronger than they were in 1800 (the "obscenity" exception to the 1st amendment has been whittled down to pretty much just child porn).

Now, I won't say the U.S. is the freest its ever been. When you take into account the experience of all Americans (not just rich white males), the freest the U.S. has ever been was probably the mid 1990's. But, it's been worse before. It was worse under the Alien and Sedition Acts. It was worse under Lincoln who governed under borderline martial law. It was worse under McCarthy. From an economic rights point of view--the country was far more regulated in 1935-1970 (vast swaths of the economy, everything from transportation to telecommunication, was deregulated from 1970-1990).

The idea that the trajectory of the U.S. has inexorably been in the direction of less freedom is nothing more than looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. It's not a perspective rooted in historical truth.

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

#90

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

raganwald wrote: post #9

It's odd, I hear people saying, "no big deal, nothing will change." But then I wonder, if you're saying it's no big deal, are you an American or not? The point of this pst is that foreign business will be affected, AFAICT, Europeans have always held the Internet to a stricter standard than Americans and have passed stricter laws around everything from what data can be retained to the behaviour of tracking cookies. If…

Study it: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/
Post reply on HN