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Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

aws.amazon.com

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#51

AWS EU reports to amazon.com in the USA. They are legally obligated to provide any data the US government requests.

And the managing director in the EU is legally obligated not to provide the data.

The more interesting question is if a conflict will ever get public?

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#52
post #38

It's AWS. Would it not still be subject to the CLOUD act? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act Seems like a lot of work to still have data that can be exfiltrated by the US.

Correct, this is meaningless. It's purely to provide a facade for companies and countries who are still fully in bed with US big tech, so they have something to point at and can delay the inevitable for longer. Another goal with this is to muddy the waters on the word "sovereign" in relation to tech e.g. "cloud". This is a big reason why they've chosen this exact name. Now every discussion regarding it is more prone…

So it's sovereign in the sense that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#53

I'm using OVH Cloud for a customer. There's a bit of uncertainty about the CLOUD Act. As OVH has a US subsidiary, they are still doing business in the US and I have seen claims that this makes also their EU offering susceptible to the CLOUD Act. Does anyone know more details?

[dead]

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#54
Fundamentally, Amazon will not promise you they will break the law. They are subject to US regulations as well as German ones (in this case). If these regulations demand your data be accessed or removed or keys compromised, it will happen. Not because of US, Germany or Amazon but because that’s how jurisdictions work. Beaides, there is no reasonably feasible method for learning what these regulations actually say on a given day, a lot of it is in bylaws and you just can’t keep track of all ministerial orders of all the applicable jurisdictions. Amazon does have an algorithm to determine course of action in case of compliance conflict, but they will not publish it for obvious reasons.

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#55

It's AWS. Would it not still be subject to the CLOUD act? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act Seems like a lot of work to still have data that can be exfiltrated by the US.

The point of setting it up as a German legal entity with US AWS having no special access is to avoid that.

All the relevant part of the CLOUD Act does is make it so when a US legal entity is asked to provide data that it controls it doesn't matter where it has stored that data. For example suppose I run an online forum. I decide to archive some records to cloud storage and remove my local copies.

I archive some of them to AWS in the US. I archive some more to a cloud provider that is in some other country and does not have any US data centers or offer services in the US (I'm going through a VPN with an endpoint in their country so they only see me using a local to them IP, and I pay via some method that doesn't tip them off that I'm American).

I get legally ordered to give copies of those archived records to law enforcement. Under the CLOUD Act I have to retrieve copies from both cloud providers and turn those over.

Note that from the foreign cloud provider's point of view nothing unusual is happening. All they see is a customer retrieving some data that that the customer previously put there, using the normal APIs that are provided for customers to do that with. They have no idea why the customer is retrieving the data.

From the way they are describing it in the article and in their FAQ at https://aws.eu/faq/ it sounds like they are setting up a German company and giving that company the rights to use a bunch of AWS technology which will be run on infrastructure owned and operated by the German company and with no operational access for US AWS. That would make it pretty much equivalent to the foreign cloud service in the example above.

The reason earlier I said "relevant part of the CLOUD Act" is that it actually did two things. One is what is described above, which for some reason is what most people focus on even though it wasn't very controversial.

The other part, which is what most opposition was over, concerned "mutual legal assistance treaties" (MLATs). These are agreements between countries to, as you might guess from the name, assist each other in law enforcement. The CLOUD Act made it so MLATs could be created through executive agreements, just requiring the Attorney General and the Secretary of State to agree that the other country had protections in place to protect US citizens.

Before the CLOUD Act MLATs were created by the executive branch negotiating the terms and then the agreement had to be ratified as a treaty by Congress, so this was a huge change.

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#56

It's AWS. Would it not still be subject to the CLOUD act? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act Seems like a lot of work to still have data that can be exfiltrated by the US.

AWS is subject to CLOUD the same way European providers like OVH, Hetzner, or Stack it are. All of these companies operate in the US.

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#57

I'm using OVH Cloud for a customer. There's a bit of uncertainty about the CLOUD Act. As OVH has a US subsidiary, they are still doing business in the US and I have seen claims that this makes also their EU offering susceptible to the CLOUD Act. Does anyone know more details?

Same as AWS with their German subsidiary.

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#59

I'm using OVH Cloud for a customer. There's a bit of uncertainty about the CLOUD Act. As OVH has a US subsidiary, they are still doing business in the US and I have seen claims that this makes also their EU offering susceptible to the CLOUD Act. Does anyone know more details?

Same as AWS with their German subsidiary.

No, because the parent org is French.

Re: Opening the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

#60
post #40

This is hilarious Since it is a US company, it is still subject to cloud act, US intelligence full access, and Trumps ability to ignore any and all laws and contracts. Microsoft execs, who have similar offerings, have confirmed this under oath. So either this is a valiant attempt by AWS that is ultimately misguided, or it is an attempt to capture customers without even a hint of legal expertise. AWS, Azure and GC sta…

It's marketing. Less informed CIOs or orgs with nasty migrations off of AWS will use it
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