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Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of nati

Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop insisting on where the data resided for jurisdictional purposes and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived. [1] OK, "we" here is probably just me -- it was one of those things where the chances of successfully convincing anyone was so small, and the commercial advantages of just nodding along, and then changing your product offering was so great, that really very few people raised it or had reason to. But somebody had to!

kjs3 17d ago
and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived Yeah, that was/is just another problem. Considering how that was actually handled in the real world before data residency laws came into force, I'm glad 'we' didn't convince those countries to put their citizens data at risk.
- dannyobrien 17d ago
  I'm not sure you were disagreeing with (past) me; but if you were, could you expand on your point?
  - kjs3 17d ago
    I'm disagreeing with you. I in the before time, I had all sorts of conversations around this topic with any number of cloud providers that were like: Us: We are concerned about our citizens (US) data, how are you managing the databases. Clout Provider (CP): They are only managed by fully background check employees. Us: Yeah, but where are they? What is their citizenship? CP: Um...mostly Eastern Europe. Lots in RU. (another CP proudly said "they're pretty much all in China...for cost containment"). Us: ... Us: We are concerned about our citizens (EU) data, how are you managing encryption? CP: Everything is perfectly encrypted with hardware HSMs and all the FIPS and stuff. Us: So...where are the folks who run the HSMs? CP: Um...mostly SV. Some in the EU. Us: But can you assemble a quorum of US citizens for the HSM? CP: Of course! Us: ... And on and on. Not to put too fine a point on it, many of us have no faith that vendors self policing international data protection in the face of government level pressure on companies and employees would work. Not that it can't, I don't think it would.
    - dannyobrien 17d ago
      (I like the accidental pun of "Clout Provider" btw, which sadly conveys some of what they try to imply). We may not be disagreeing that much. My argument was, and is, it's not about where the data is, it's about who has control over it. The counter-argument was "well if it's in another country, then we don't have jurisdiction, so it's going to be much harder". But what you need jurisdiction over is the people. Otherwise, you end up with multi-national corporate end-runs where you have shonky companies offering to store data locally, but who knows what department has control and access. To be fair, the context I was having these conversations was countries arguing for data residency to combat the threat of mass surveillance (corporate and governmental) in the US, and the limited protections their users had relative to US nationals. But again, the problem is that it assumes that jurisdiction remains territorial: which is not how this was ever going to play out. The next wave after data residency requirements, beyond the usual extraterritorial intelligence community actions, was laws like the US CLOUD Act, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act, and Australia's TIA law, which effectively attempts to provide regular government departments and law enforcement with the legal ability to access data that would technically be on foreign soil. My point was not that corporations should not self-police, but the concept of "it's stored here so we can oversee it" is not as clearcut as it seemed, and it risks introducing a new level of complexity to resiliently storing data. Which may be worth the price, but was never considered at the level this was discussed.
      - kjs3 17d ago
        That's fair, and it sounds like we aren't that far apart. It is, in fact, about control. So I'll restate my central theme as "until the idea of enforceable data sovereignty requirements were enshrined in law, the cloud providers did not and would not delegate control of any body of data to 'controllers' that weren't in jurisdictions where they could be influenced/coerced to compromise that data". Was this a slippery slope/camel in the tent? Well...that's politics and it didn't have to be, but I see your point. But the reality is the push for data sovereignty wasn't done with the intention of enabling totalitarian follow-on legislation and it wasn't in and of itself a bad idea. Best laid plans and all that.
mitxela 17d ago
Is there not more than one data center in your country? Is the power feed at your office too small to put a computer there?
- deleted 17d ago
  [deleted]
- dannyobrien 17d ago
  I think both of these things are (very) often true, but it is also true that if I'm going to have backups, it is (all other things being equal) better to minimize correlated risk. The assumption in a lot of these conversations is that having the data "in one place" (ie inside a country) was "safer" than having it in "somewhere else". The tougher counterintuitive argument was that it can be safer to have data stored in multiple places, for some risk assessments -- and that for others, having data close by was less important, in the case of seizure or surveillance or illegal use, than who had legal or effective access to that data.
  - mitxela 17d ago
    > I think both of these things are (very) often true, You think most countries have one data center or less, and most offices have less than two hundred watts of electricity supply?
    - dannyobrien 13d ago
      No, I was agreeing with you.
wand3r 17d ago
This is a very engineer-centric view. I studied economics in school, so an analogy in that realm is ironically how all countries should specialize and raise the PPC curve. The reality of the situation was that in 2010 not many people understood how powerful big data actually was. Data sovereignty is actually quite logical when you consider the scale and power of not only the company, but the US as a whole. I can assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws. You can also create reasonably diversified data silos within a country. As an aside, it is quite crazy the world we live in. I am with the majority where I expected Amazon to be more redundant, but I still marvel at the assumption that a US dev can spin up multiple redundant and data sovereign servers in dozens of countries with efficient caching, failover and redundancy (enough to survive an earthquake or targeted missile attack) from their own home. Even a few hours of outage in a foreign country is considered unacceptable.
- dannyobrien 17d ago
  See my other answers, but briefly: no, they were not thinking about this, which is why we were raising it. I guess the counterintuitive point we were trying to get across is that with most things, the best way to keep it safe from being lost is to put it in a known place, and lock it away. But for data, the strategy -- for that scenario -- is to keep it in a lot of places, with heterogenous defense strategies. This is for data loss, of course, not access or surveillance or unlawful processing. But there is a cost as well as a benefit to deliberately limiting your options. (I can feel someone saying "but surely having redundancy in one country is good enough, so I'll just say that I know relatively sane people who try to have hemispheric redundancy in their data, and also you never know when two different-in-every-quality-but one locations will suffer from the same disaster. Floods; heat-waves; national protests and strikes. It's surprising how often rare things happen!) On your second point, it really is crazy. And also amazing that this is a capability that is -- or should be -- available to anyone in the world, not just in the US, and not just devs. Hopefully without also having to think about their data suddenly finding itself in a warzone.
  - simoncion 17d ago
ngc248 17d ago
you know this is why china and russia were stealing data, so that they can provide you backups if you lost yours /s
watwut 17d ago
I mean, it was clear and open that USA will spy on any data stored in there. Because foreigner do not get legal protections. And second, the USA is in the middle of power grab that completely ensures any data stored there will be taken hostage wherever suitable for "negotiations".
KaiserPro 17d ago
> start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived. As soon as you start specify technologies, rather than "sovereignty" you end up needing to created specific legal tests to stop people getting around it. "Data must be stored domestically" is a short hand for being held in the same legal jurisdiction. This means for somewhere like the UK, you get all that battle tested data protections law for free. (new laws require case history to be reliable. Ie, prosecuting under a new law is hard, because if its on the edge of being legal, it can create a precedent that undermines the entire law) In civil code places, its different, but I don't know enough to offer even a half arsed opinion. The reason why jurisdiction is important is because if you are storing data outside of your legal protection, when something goes wrong there is little you can do to discourage fuckery. This is the problem with blinkered engineering thinking. Yes geographically distributed data storage is good. But as you also know, storing it in place with lots of other data, means that its a target. The more places its stored, the more physical security you need. This means that there is higher chance of people being bribed. Its not a binary, its a multi-dimension graph, with no one answer. Every dimension has a tradeoff. UAE's tradeoff was: not even trump would ignore all the wargaming that clearly shows kicking iran in the nuts would have inflation rising consequences

kjs3 17d ago

and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived Yeah, that was/is just another problem. Considering how that was actually handled in the real world before data residency laws came into force, I'm glad 'we' didn't convince those countries to put their citizens data at risk.

dannyobrien 17d ago
I'm not sure you were disagreeing with (past) me; but if you were, could you expand on your point?
- kjs3 17d ago
  I'm disagreeing with you. I in the before time, I had all sorts of conversations around this topic with any number of cloud providers that were like: Us: We are concerned about our citizens (US) data, how are you managing the databases. Clout Provider (CP): They are only managed by fully background check employees. Us: Yeah, but where are they? What is their citizenship? CP: Um...mostly Eastern Europe. Lots in RU. (another CP proudly said "they're pretty much all in China...for cost containment"). Us: ... Us: We are concerned about our citizens (EU) data, how are you managing encryption? CP: Everything is perfectly encrypted with hardware HSMs and all the FIPS and stuff. Us: So...where are the folks who run the HSMs? CP: Um...mostly SV. Some in the EU. Us: But can you assemble a quorum of US citizens for the HSM? CP: Of course! Us: ... And on and on. Not to put too fine a point on it, many of us have no faith that vendors self policing international data protection in the face of government level pressure on companies and employees would work. Not that it can't, I don't think it would.
  - dannyobrien 17d ago
    (I like the accidental pun of "Clout Provider" btw, which sadly conveys some of what they try to imply). We may not be disagreeing that much. My argument was, and is, it's not about where the data is, it's about who has control over it. The counter-argument was "well if it's in another country, then we don't have jurisdiction, so it's going to be much harder". But what you need jurisdiction over is the people. Otherwise, you end up with multi-national corporate end-runs where you have shonky companies offering to store data locally, but who knows what department has control and access. To be fair, the context I was having these conversations was countries arguing for data residency to combat the threat of mass surveillance (corporate and governmental) in the US, and the limited protections their users had relative to US nationals. But again, the problem is that it assumes that jurisdiction remains territorial: which is not how this was ever going to play out. The next wave after data residency requirements, beyond the usual extraterritorial intelligence community actions, was laws like the US CLOUD Act, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act, and Australia's TIA law, which effectively attempts to provide regular government departments and law enforcement with the legal ability to access data that would technically be on foreign soil. My point was not that corporations should not self-police, but the concept of "it's stored here so we can oversee it" is not as clearcut as it seemed, and it risks introducing a new level of complexity to resiliently storing data. Which may be worth the price, but was never considered at the level this was discussed.
    - kjs3 17d ago
      That's fair, and it sounds like we aren't that far apart. It is, in fact, about control. So I'll restate my central theme as "until the idea of enforceable data sovereignty requirements were enshrined in law, the cloud providers did not and would not delegate control of any body of data to 'controllers' that weren't in jurisdictions where they could be influenced/coerced to compromise that data". Was this a slippery slope/camel in the tent? Well...that's politics and it didn't have to be, but I see your point. But the reality is the push for data sovereignty wasn't done with the intention of enabling totalitarian follow-on legislation and it wasn't in and of itself a bad idea. Best laid plans and all that.

mitxela 17d ago

Is there not more than one data center in your country? Is the power feed at your office too small to put a computer there?

deleted 17d ago
[deleted]
dannyobrien 17d ago
I think both of these things are (very) often true, but it is also true that if I'm going to have backups, it is (all other things being equal) better to minimize correlated risk. The assumption in a lot of these conversations is that having the data "in one place" (ie inside a country) was "safer" than having it in "somewhere else". The tougher counterintuitive argument was that it can be safer to have data stored in multiple places, for some risk assessments -- and that for others, having data close by was less important, in the case of seizure or surveillance or illegal use, than who had legal or effective access to that data.
- mitxela 17d ago
  > I think both of these things are (very) often true, You think most countries have one data center or less, and most offices have less than two hundred watts of electricity supply?
  - dannyobrien 13d ago
    No, I was agreeing with you.

wand3r 17d ago

This is a very engineer-centric view. I studied economics in school, so an analogy in that realm is ironically how all countries should specialize and raise the PPC curve. The reality of the situation was that in 2010 not many people understood how powerful big data actually was. Data sovereignty is actually quite logical when you consider the scale and power of not only the company, but the US as a whole. I can assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws. You can also create reasonably diversified data silos within a country. As an aside, it is quite crazy the world we live in. I am with the majority where I expected Amazon to be more redundant, but I still marvel at the assumption that a US dev can spin up multiple redundant and data sovereign servers in dozens of countries with efficient caching, failover and redundancy (enough to survive an earthquake or targeted missile attack) from their own home. Even a few hours of outage in a foreign country is considered unacceptable.

dannyobrien 17d ago
See my other answers, but briefly: no, they were not thinking about this, which is why we were raising it. I guess the counterintuitive point we were trying to get across is that with most things, the best way to keep it safe from being lost is to put it in a known place, and lock it away. But for data, the strategy -- for that scenario -- is to keep it in a lot of places, with heterogenous defense strategies. This is for data loss, of course, not access or surveillance or unlawful processing. But there is a cost as well as a benefit to deliberately limiting your options. (I can feel someone saying "but surely having redundancy in one country is good enough, so I'll just say that I know relatively sane people who try to have hemispheric redundancy in their data, and also you never know when two different-in-every-quality-but one locations will suffer from the same disaster. Floods; heat-waves; national protests and strikes. It's surprising how often rare things happen!) On your second point, it really is crazy. And also amazing that this is a capability that is -- or should be -- available to anyone in the world, not just in the US, and not just devs. Hopefully without also having to think about their data suddenly finding itself in a warzone.
- simoncion 17d ago

ngc248 17d ago

you know this is why china and russia were stealing data, so that they can provide you backups if you lost yours /s

watwut 17d ago

I mean, it was clear and open that USA will spy on any data stored in there. Because foreigner do not get legal protections. And second, the USA is in the middle of power grab that completely ensures any data stored there will be taken hostage wherever suitable for "negotiations".

KaiserPro 17d ago

> start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived. As soon as you start specify technologies, rather than "sovereignty" you end up needing to created specific legal tests to stop people getting around it. "Data must be stored domestically" is a short hand for being held in the same legal jurisdiction. This means for somewhere like the UK, you get all that battle tested data protections law for free. (new laws require case history to be reliable. Ie, prosecuting under a new law is hard, because if its on the edge of being legal, it can create a precedent that undermines the entire law) In civil code places, its different, but I don't know enough to offer even a half arsed opinion. The reason why jurisdiction is important is because if you are storing data outside of your legal protection, when something goes wrong there is little you can do to discourage fuckery. This is the problem with blinkered engineering thinking. Yes geographically distributed data storage is good. But as you also know, storing it in place with lots of other data, means that its a target. The more places its stored, the more physical security you need. This means that there is higher chance of people being bribed. Its not a binary, its a multi-dimension graph, with no one answer. Every dimension has a tradeoff. UAE's tradeoff was: not even trump would ignore all the wargaming that clearly shows kicking iran in the nuts would have inflation rising consequences