Here's an example: http://blog.workhere.io/mozilla-needs-to-move-persona-out-of.../ And as much as I love Google, I don't know how much comfortable I am in using their cloud services for everything... Unless they allow me to choose which of their datacenters my email is being stored.
Out of curiosity, if you had the choice, where would your datacenter of choice be?
I don't know. If not in my own home (I've thought about it, but since I moved around so many times it's not feasible), maybe Iceland? I really don't know. Europe is farily good in privacy laws, except maybe Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
Yeah, I thought about setting up some sort of VPN at home but it's not feasible at this point.
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 because the legality of the spying hinges on whether US citizens are subject to it, I still find it a rather fascinating aspect.
As a Finnish my first thought about this was that: "Obama stole all my private data. Can I vote for the next U.S. president now?". There was already some article in Finnish news paper celebrating that our domestic cloud business might have a growth spurt because of this. But I'd look to Switzerland for that.
Thats the other reason I don't get about this "Killing US Internet Industry" discussion. So you move all over your servers overseas and immediately you have less rights to privacy than before as far as the NSA is concerned. Really just makes it just easier for them to access your data.
The deal is this. There is something like 200 million American internet users while there is 400 million European internet users. At the same time China and India are growing. You can keep serving those 200 million Americans as long as you wish, but if the rest of the worlds privacy is raped in the process, they might opt to use some other services than yours. Good luck with that trade deficit.
It's probably the word 'government' that's spooking everyone out. I think most people are conjuring up visions of the NSA telling insurance companies about your medical records and stuff. That or they probably think they'll be sending a SWAT team to your door every time you tweet about getting high or something. The point is, there are already checks and balances that exist to protect your privacy. Just because an organization has collected your data, doesn't mean they can look at it. Your metadata, no matter how much you try to hide it, is visible to a lot of people. Hell, your ISP probably uses that same metadata for all it's marketing and operational planning anyway. I personally don't think the US Justice system is so impotent that it cannot impose effective safeguards on the government.
I think your right. While evil corporations can collect and profile people they don't have the ability to put you in prison, so there isn't this relationship between privacy and freedom. And I think that people like to feel that it has some impact on their lives because it puts them at the center of the issue. We can all relate to having our personal privacy violated, but its harder to have a conversation about having some people's privacy infringed upon especially when there is a little bit of mystery around the topics that the NSA is really monitoring. I'd probably get concerned if this were happening at a state level, where the police were involved in data collection, or if this were actually something new. But people still post about underage drinking on twitter, and talk about drugs on facebook, so I'm not really concerned. That and I like knowing that there are people in the world that have bigger issues on their hands than cracking down on those kinds of things.
In fact, a lot of people like to think that the real issue isn't privacy infringement at all, but rather a sign of how large and powerful the intelligence-industrial complex has become. I read something rather interesting on Reddit the other day. Here's the comment. It's quite a handful
Yet another article from a guy who thinks this is "new" and something Obama did... do these people even do research anymore? These programs and programs like this all date back to before the cold war. There's ones that get shutdown, new ones that pop up, and others that get renamed, but they are always there. And it's not just the NSA. It's the FBI, the CIA, the DHS, and every branch of the military. But reading that article was painful because he kept mentioning how it "just happened", and "now that Obama has done this" type statements. Ugh. Do some more research Mr. author, this is nothing new, and nothing Obama "created", it's just one of the man iterations of the same intelligence gathering policies that have been going on since we were trying to find Ruskie spies hiding amongst us decades ago. This author is dense at best, and honestly seems like he wrote his article based off of Reddit comments or some other equally shitty source. I feel like a broken record replying to all these NSA articles.
Candidate Obama used it as a differentiator of himself. Here is a video of him in 2007 talking about how the tapping of US Citizens is bad and about the preservation of constitutional rights to privacy.
The impresion I have is that Obama "was convinced" to go along with these programs after elected. He might have truly believed the system was not abusive, or if he didn't he would be risking creating enemies inside his government, or both. The problem is, no matter how much non-abusive such a system might be today/yesterday, it will/would derail into abuse in the future (1 year, 5 years, 10 years time, who knows). There's no way people with this kind of power would always "be responsible".
Yeah, I'm with you on this phree. Obama actively campaigned to protect our civil liberties and once in office completely ignored them. He's a liar. Wolf in sheep's clothing.
He also promised to stop these "Wars of agression", and apparently that meant just being more quiet it about it and attacking Pakistan with drones. I do get what you are saying. But no offense, surprise surprise a candidate from one of the two major parties said something on the campaign trail that he didn't follow through with once in office. Color me surprised. :) My only point was he didn't start these programs, and even if he did want to stop them good luck putting the kaibosh on numerous programs numbering in the billions of dollars. Pulling the plug would be tough, and be met with lots of push back.
They do. And the Clinton cruise missile strikes. People hailed Clintor for not going to war, but he launched hundreds of cruise missiles into Iraq during his presidency.Do the Pakistan drone strikes remind you at all of the Cambodia bombings?
You should check out mk's post. It seems to me that the "boiling frog" anecdote is perfect for where we find ourselves. The water is getting pretty damn warm.
Maybe I am reading this wrong, but my impression is that you are saying that people should not feel indignant now because the US has a history of similar overreaches. If that’s the case, I don’t agree with that stance. We did know that The Bush administration was copying all AT&T internet traffic for a time, but we did not have clear evidence that it continued. We also did not have evidence, particularly evidence confirmed by the government, of massive coordination by the plurality of major internet companies that provide email, search and other messaging and storage technologies. Before this week, I did believe that the NSA probably needed a court order to get my emails from Google. I did not know that Google was providing them to the NSA a priori. Nevertheless, even if there were smoke that people should have picked up on earlier, before last week, alleging that the US was doing just this would have been met with disbelief in the wider media. It would have been labeled as unfounded paranoia. The PRISM revelations, and the government confirmation, has provided us proof of a very large scope program, and signals not only the direction that the US is taking, but that while Obama once felt he had to campaign on a different position, from here on out, total information awareness is to be a non-issue. With this story and the Obama administration’s response, the US surveillance narrative is moving from scattered evidence of abuse to the normalization of a police state.
No, sorry if it came off that way. I'm just miffed about how all of a sudden every journalist/blogger and internet commenter is an expert on NSA and PRISM, and many of the articles I've read over the last few days act like this is something new that just happened. I'm more frustrated that people aren't doing their research, and haven't cared for the last 6 decades about this stuff, and even after this NSA/PRISM thing none of them still did any research. That program started in 97 under Clinton, it was exposed in 2006 under Bush. A lot of these programs really took off under Clinton, because let's not forget, he was a two term President that was in office during the internet boom and massive growth. A new technology that needed to be monitored (for them). A lot of new programs and a ton of funding got funneled into programs like this during that time, because they saw so many communications moving to this new medium. Every President since the cold war has been involved in these programs, be it democrat or republican. Exactly. I hang around some conspiracy communities, though I think most of those people are nuts and think most of their "theories" are complete bullshit (I don't even like mentioning that I read conspiracy sites or like associating myself with them), but I've always been interested in the capabilities of the US government. I remember reading about ECHELON when I was in middle school, and back then, even mentioning something like that to people was met with people saying I "shouldn't be so paranoid", and "why would the government want to listen to my phone calls?" type responses. So no, my previous comment you replied to wasn't telling people "it's okay because it's always been around", it was more ripping on that writer for not being a good writer, reporter, or doing any research whatsoever. Now that the stories out about NSA/PRISM, I want to remind and educate people when I have the chance to inform them that there are hundreds of programs, and that they date back decades. The outrage needs to be focused on the spying on American citizens in general, not the NSA and PRISM specifically. I just wish more reporters and journalists were talking about the history of these programs, and how bad it really is, and how massive these programs really are. I just fear that like every other "internet outrage" that this will be forgotten in a week or two, and everyone will go back to talking about how much the Xbox One sucks or something.you are saying that people should not feel indignant now because the US has a history of similar overreaches.
We did know that The Bush administration was copying all AT&T internet traffic for a time, but we did not have clear evidence that it continued.
It would have been labeled as unfounded paranoia.