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I'm preparing for a big vote down on this one. I don't understand why this is a blow against U.S. surveillance, isn't it in fact, the opposite? U.S. law suppos

I'm preparing for a big vote down on this one. I don't understand why this is a blow against U.S. surveillance, isn't it in fact, the opposite? U.S. law supposedly doesn't allow the NSA to conduct domestic intercept on US citizens except through "legal" means. There is no such protection for the NSA monitoring overseas communications. Didn't the NSA and GCHQ have to get each other to spy on each other's domestic data? But in a European datacenter, wouldn't the "gloves be off" with respect to NSA intercept? There wouldn't even be a need for a kangaroo FISA court or NSL. To me, this all seems like a total break with the spirit of the internet. I grew up on the internet in the 80s, where we actually imagined it transcending national concerns and local politics. Remember John Perry Barlow's Cyberspace Declaration of Independence? (https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html) The whole point around federated decentralized networking, was common carriage of data, non-discrimination, and the fact that you could host a server and serve anyone from all around the world without having to worry about hundreds of different legal regimes stepping on your toes. Now it seems we've got the exact opposite of the internet imagined in the 80s and 90s, free of political interference. Instead, if you set up a server on the internet these days, you'll have to worry about European "rights to be forgotten" and privacy laws, Chinese or Russia censorship, Thai insults to the King, and on and on. The simplicity of "here's my site/app, if you don't like it, please don't use it", has been replaced with "please track the geo-ip of your users, make sure you host copies of your server in the EU, Russia, China, and elsewhere, and route traffic appropriately. Be ready to comply with 50 different national internet regulations, some of them contradictory." The internet of my teen years has become one giant bifurcated mess, and I fear what was once a kind of global village, will become a nation-by-nation silo. Sure, there may be very good reasons to want these regulations. But it's not clear to me that the ends justifies the means. It's not even clear to me that the state snooping has been as damaging as cyberattacks by criminal gangs stealing people's data. Every week passwords, credit cards, and other information is being compromised by hackers and sold on the black market. Millions of smartphones and PCs are infected with viruses, keyloggers, backdoors. And yet, all of the focus is on the government snoops. What's the right to privacy and data protection if your data is forced to be hosted locally in your nation, but compromised by hackers, and then sold to governments? Is the original idea of the internet and web worth preserving, a kind of autonomous zone, a wild wild west, or do we need to lock it down, and turn it into national highways with freeway cops and political speed limits?

empressplay 11y ago
The NSA doesn't need any sort of court order to access domestic data on non-US citizens / residents. While it's true that offshoring the data of US citizens could make it easier for the NSA to access that data, the court case concerns the ability of the NSA to access data of non-citizens, and while there may be agreements in place with European countries to facilitate this, at the very least this forces the NSA to go through those outside channels, rather than just getting the data directly from say, Facebook.
- cromwellian 11y ago
  But to get data from say, Facebook in the US, the NSA must get a secret court order. This requires Facebook's cooperation. To get data from European data centers, the NSA can intercept data from direct network taps in the ground, under the sea, at peering points. They can intercept router or server hardware during data center construction and plant backdoors. In short, they can take all sorts of action that might be illegal domestically, but which they can't be prosecuted for in the US if done overseas. At best, European police/counter-intelligence could catch them in the act and arrest them as spies. So basically, European data held on domestic US soil has a greater level of bureaucracy get, compared to say, European data held on foreign soil, where all bets are off. Remember the Echelon scares of the 90s? That was the NSA using SIGINT interception of European cellular traffic with zero oversight or regulation. My point is, this seems to be solving a non-problem. It makes creating new companies harder and more expensive, won't actually decrease net snooping/surveillance, and threatens to silo the internet.
  - yardie 11y ago
    You are thinking of the FBI. The FBI gets a court order to look for a specific subject and it outlines who they are interested (even if it is a John Doe) and what they are allowed to take. No judge is going to sign off on big data search. It's going to get punted in court or leaves any case made from it open to appeal. There are hundreds of datacentera throughout Europe. The equipment necessary to do all that would be very visible. And you would need the cooperation of all the employees to not say anything. You can tap a router or a switch it a server but a datacentet has thousands of these. You can't tap them all. If you did your customers would ask questions and the smart ones would be gone in an hour. We have a disaster recovery plan you know. American exceptionalism strikes again. How about you read their laws rather than assume ours are better. Anyone can listen into the airwaves. It's public property. Now they encrypt phone calls. They can do all these extra legal things knowing it's not admissible in court. You want to do business you follow the law. It's how it's always worked.

empressplay 11y ago

The NSA doesn't need any sort of court order to access domestic data on non-US citizens / residents. While it's true that offshoring the data of US citizens could make it easier for the NSA to access that data, the court case concerns the ability of the NSA to access data of non-citizens, and while there may be agreements in place with European countries to facilitate this, at the very least this forces the NSA to go through those outside channels, rather than just getting the data directly from say, Facebook.

cromwellian 11y ago
But to get data from say, Facebook in the US, the NSA must get a secret court order. This requires Facebook's cooperation. To get data from European data centers, the NSA can intercept data from direct network taps in the ground, under the sea, at peering points. They can intercept router or server hardware during data center construction and plant backdoors. In short, they can take all sorts of action that might be illegal domestically, but which they can't be prosecuted for in the US if done overseas. At best, European police/counter-intelligence could catch them in the act and arrest them as spies. So basically, European data held on domestic US soil has a greater level of bureaucracy get, compared to say, European data held on foreign soil, where all bets are off. Remember the Echelon scares of the 90s? That was the NSA using SIGINT interception of European cellular traffic with zero oversight or regulation. My point is, this seems to be solving a non-problem. It makes creating new companies harder and more expensive, won't actually decrease net snooping/surveillance, and threatens to silo the internet.
- yardie 11y ago
  You are thinking of the FBI. The FBI gets a court order to look for a specific subject and it outlines who they are interested (even if it is a John Doe) and what they are allowed to take. No judge is going to sign off on big data search. It's going to get punted in court or leaves any case made from it open to appeal. There are hundreds of datacentera throughout Europe. The equipment necessary to do all that would be very visible. And you would need the cooperation of all the employees to not say anything. You can tap a router or a switch it a server but a datacentet has thousands of these. You can't tap them all. If you did your customers would ask questions and the smart ones would be gone in an hour. We have a disaster recovery plan you know. American exceptionalism strikes again. How about you read their laws rather than assume ours are better. Anyone can listen into the airwaves. It's public property. Now they encrypt phone calls. They can do all these extra legal things knowing it's not admissible in court. You want to do business you follow the law. It's how it's always worked.