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Dear USA, my data has left your building

cpbotha.net

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Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#11

Post by smackay »

jacquesm wrote: post #7

Nitpickers aside (yes, what they had they may still have or at least in digest form) this is a single instance of a tidal wave of people doing this. EU datacenters are doing quite well because of the NSA revelations. The economic impact of this could very well counteract any net plus the US had while they were able to spy at will. Likely it's not going to be the same parties that will end up footing the bill. The pra…

At least there is a glimmer of hope (no matter how delusional) that the political process in Europe can be influenced and at some date in the future the monitoring can be turned off or at least put under more rigorous oversight.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#12

Post by drhowarddrfine »

jacquesm wrote: post #7

Nitpickers aside (yes, what they had they may still have or at least in digest form) this is a single instance of a tidal wave of people doing this. EU datacenters are doing quite well because of the NSA revelations. The economic impact of this could very well counteract any net plus the US had while they were able to spy at will. Likely it's not going to be the same parties that will end up footing the bill. The pra…

The EU hubs are having huge problems cause the NSA people were getting in the way of their own country's spies trying to get their work done.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#13

Post by rsync »

Obviously we[1] sympathize with this, since we've been running a swiss location since 2006 - one that has become increasingly busy in the last 3-4 months.

However, I personally don't store my data there - even though I am deeply disturbed by the recent revelations and invoke all manner of security precautions in my own digital life.

First of all, it appears that intra-US Internet traffic is subject to less scrutiny and open to a much more narrow interpretation of the laws that (supposedly) allow this snooping to happen. Once your traffic leaves the US, the 4A (and other) protections seem to relax significantly. Let's set aside for the moment the bad behavior of other global and national "observers" on the network, which we have to assume are at least as bad as the US NSA ... and let's just concern ourselves with the US side of things. From that perspective, moving your traffic out of the US appears to have a lot of unintended consequences.

Second, it really shouldn't matter. SSH is SSH and duplicity is duplicity and storing a fragmented TC container is ... well you get the idea. If I have the right toolset[2], I should be able to store my data on a USB stick that I leave in the NSA lobby every night. You should ask yourself how large and unwieldy your digital life has become if you can't just trust the math.

Oh, and also ...[3]

[1] rsync.net

[2] SSL/PKI is not the right toolset. gmail is not the right toolset. Weirdo walled garden dropbox gdrive non-standard private API garbage is not the right toolset.

[3] We support synology devices perfectly, right out of the box, and right through their GUI config. Just saying.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#14

Post by targusman »

dcc1 wrote: post #5

Over the last month I have cancelled all our servers in US, setting up a new one this morning in Amsterdam One thing I am worried about is potential liability of having someone sueing us under data protection laws here in Ireland, claiming their data was inspected by US and we couldnt protect their privacy Here in Europe we get to have data protection commisioners and strong laws on the subject unlike across the pond…

Yup, there is no way would those data protection commissioners ever, ever be corrupted through offers of money or secret threat like any other civil servant, political appointee, or corporate drone. Those people are perfect!

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#15

Post by cpbotha »

mswe wrote: post #6

Dear cpbotha, You can run, but you can't hide. - USA

Dear USA,

You are probably correct. My point is that I can make it slightly more complicated for you to sniff around in my data, and that was the whole point of this move.

If more people do this, it will get progressively harder for you to do your mass surveillance job as you do it now.

I'm sorry I had to leave you, cpbotha

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#18

Post by cpbotha »

sneak wrote: post #17

The problem is that all of your email conversations are with people who still use gmail. Game over.

You are correct.

However, I am simply taking all MY email out of gmail, so that MY database is not the one that's used to get information about others. Besides this, because I'm not using gmail anymore, I'm using OpenPGP more often to sign and encrypt emails.

I agree that it's a drop in the bucket, but it's a drop that I had to add.

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#19

Post by MattJ100 »

rsync wrote: post #13

Obviously we[1] sympathize with this, since we've been running a swiss location since 2006 - one that has become increasingly busy in the last 3-4 months. However, I personally don't store my data there - even though I am deeply disturbed by the recent revelations and invoke all manner of security precautions in my own digital life. First of all, it appears that intra-US Internet traffic is subject to less scrutiny a…

I have a Synology device (exact same model as the article author actually, and likewise I love it).

However I'm having trouble finding a way to back it up securely. The built-in backup methods don't seem to account for encrypting the backups (even if the volume is encrypted). Any suggestions?

Re: Dear USA, my data has left your building

#20

Post by cpbotha »

stef25 wrote: post #16

It's not clear to me if you dropped your gmail address? Running email outside of gmail is easy enough, but changing email address to another domain is a total pain.

Fortunately I've been using my own domains on top of gmail for the past few years.

I still have my gmail account to see what mail ends up in there (and then notify people), and to use google+ (not going to stop that yet).

Already probably about 98% of important mail is going directly to addresses on my own domains.

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