171–180 of 291 posts
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The point is they cannot get a court to compel you to hand it over. Yes, they can take what they can get.
And my point is that what they can get without a court order is more than they can get with one.
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Wasn't Australia already implicated as a collaborator in ECHELON?
Yes Australia runs a SIGINT collection point for the NSA, at least since the 90s.
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At least in most countries, this is just not the way it works, legally. Every country has different rights for citizens and non-citizens. For example, the US has held the 4th amendment does not apply to non-citizens who are not "part of the national community" (IE if a bunch of canadians came down and fished every weekend, you could search them however without violating the 4th amendment. If they lived here illegally…
Foreigners don't want equal rights. Just equal protections from the government.
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Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.
Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website. According to the whistleblower, they don't in any meaningful sense. They collect all the data they can, and then currently only use bits of it, when they feel that is justified. His point about checking the US president's email in the video was tha…
A 51% confidence that your target is not American when looking at a service where 15% of the users are American, or one where only 29% of the users of the users are Americans is a meaningless standard. Now the only hope right now is that companies push back but the question is how much given that they were not willing to push back enough to break silence.
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I think a better way to look at it is that rights are cultural, but that if we are serious about living in a decent and respectful world we should in our actions extend to others the rights we want to have ourselves. Does free speech extend to advocating going out and killing all African Americans at a white supremacist rally? In the US it does, but only because of our bad experiences during the Red Scares. In Canada…
we should in our actions extend to others the rights we want to have ourselves That belief is cultural too - it just so happens that almost every culture has independently arrived at it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule is a fascinating read.
It goes the other way in not so great ways also that we tend to project those things we do not like about ourselves onto our enemies.
If someone accuses everyone else of being a thief, expect that the accuser is the one responsible, but the person who respects everyone is probably respectable himself.
One of the rather interesting side issues in this whole debate has been how casually the rights of foreigners are tossed aside as secondary to those of american citizens. There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else. While I understand that this is largely becaus…
I suspect the primary reason we (in the USA) are focusing so much on it is that these are the people appointed, promoted, funded, etc., by people we elected. Some people think that has meaning while many are cynical enough to think that they're all the same under the various masks. This is a revelation for most people, especially younger people, and they're dealing with the immediate, personal, consequences. As with…
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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…
I can think of one very prominent example:
It will be a lot harder to win an argument against them now that everybody knows that data which is stored in the U.S. is free bait for the NSA to play with. It's no longer fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's just fear now.
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.
Aanyway, I though these hosting companies where a dime a dozen?
One of the rather interesting side issues in this whole debate has been how casually the rights of foreigners are tossed aside as secondary to those of american citizens. There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else. While I understand that this is largely becaus…
Absolutely. I remember how in 2001 when the US as the first country ever invoked article 5 of the NATO treaty, within hours all NATO members had followed through with support. And the minute of silence that was held all over Europe for the 9/11 victims. Then we joined them in two wars. We bought their cell phones, their operating systems and productivity suites, their internet adds, hosting and email services and mov…
To be fair, folks in the US bought a LOT of European cell phones first. :)