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U.S. cloud firms face backlash from NSA spy programs
- computer 13y agoI too have switched my personal things and most of our company away from the US. I have helped my friends move to non-US chat services and/or use OTR. I will spend my money on secure (from snooping and the operator) encrypted services outside the US instead. Seeing that we have no rights in the US whatsoever, it is ridiculous to store anything in the United States that could be used in any way at any point in the future. If the US wants to keep its leading role in the Cloud-business, it will need to curb these programs and protect the companies from forced participation in mass surveillance measures (including on foreigners). Keep in mind that even a single policy-maker that decides not to trust US-based services can cost the US economy millions of dollars.
- deegles 13y agoHonest question, what makes you think that you will have more rights/privacy by hosting somewhere else? It's been my impression that there has been (comparatively) little backlash within the US regarding foreign data acquisition. Maybe all this attention on the NSA's activities will be the trigger for other countries to create or ramp-up their own data snooping efforts.
- pietro 13y agoDid you follow the news from Germany? Merkel might lose the election over not opposing the NSA. People still remember Stasi.
- computer 13y agoFor whatever I self-host, I use open source software I trust (and sometimes contribute to). For other services, I either encrypt as much as possible (i.e. encrypted storage, OTR for chat, PGP for email) and accept that anything non-encrypted is virtually public. I could also host these encrypted things in the US, but here in Europe I have lawful rights, and my government does not torture, nor does it kill citizens who it sees as evil without any due process. I guess it's as much of a boycott as it is preventing a country that does not have my interests at heart from having access to my data and/or metadata. Note that about a year ago the Dutch government has announced the AIVD (~Dutch NSA/CIA) budget is being cut 40% over the next few years, and defense spending has gone down too.
- Nrsolis 13y agoI'm sorry, but you are displaying a remarkable level of naiveté about how the world works. I'm not excusing the NSA, but the reason why the USA is exceptional is precisely BECAUSE things like this are an aberration and not accepted as a matter of course. We discuss them as a society and change our government when it gets out of line. Lets not forget that it was a democratically elected government in Europe that started WWII. And killed millions for nothing more than being born who they were. Systematically, and with the full acquiescence of the favored population.
- sesqu 13y agoThat's... not quite true. I'm not excusing WWII, the reason Europe is exceptional is precisely BECAUSE things like that are an aberration and not accepted as a matter of course. They discuss them as a society and change their government when it gets out of line. Let's not forget that it was a democratically elected government in the USA that started...
- bobwaycott 13y ago> Lets not forget that it was a democratically elected government in Europe that started WWII. And killed millions for nothing more than being born who they were. Systematically, and with the full acquiescence of the favored population. I'm sorry, but you are displaying a remarkable level of naiveté and outright stupidity about how history happened. Hitler was not democratically elected. Hitler had only been a legal German citizen, permitted to run for office, for less than one month. Hitler ran for President with the intention of using the office to destroy the constitution and establish a dictatorship (under which it is extremely dubious to justifiably assess 'full acquiescence' of the population). He assumed the presidency after losing the election because Hindenburg died two years after defeating Hitler, and Hindenburg ran for re-election expressly to prevent Hitler from becoming president. After Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as Chancellor, the 1933 elections were an inarguably undemocratic election, in which new "elections" were held after Hitler urged dissolution of the Reichstag. The Nazis relied on widespread violence and intimidation, culminating in the Reichstag fire and subsequent laws that eviscerated civil liberties and imprisoned political opponents. The Nazis even "monitored" the elections to ensure they achieved a majority. Slavery, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, sexism, paternalism, COINTELPRO, etc.--all these have strong places in American history of being the norm, not the aberration, and being accepted as a matter of course.
- pessimizer 13y agoThat you don't know if another country is monitoring as deeply as the U.S. isn't a good reason for considering the U.S., who we know is monitoring as deeply as the U.S.:)
- notimetorelax 13y agoFor many purposes it is a reason.
- bigiain 13y agoI'm not the OP, but I'll add my two bits here anyway… I'm moving things off US hosted services - but at the same time I'm also ramping up my privacy protections as well. For example, I'm changing from using Dropbox to using EncFS encrypted data stored on JottaCloud. I'm not _relying_ on Norwegian based storage to be any less at risk from the Norwegian state security service than Dropbox(/Amazon) data stored in the US - but while it's possible that the NSA might have crypto attacks or hardware/software backdoors that work against my OS and/or EncFS/GPG - there's a _much_ lower chance that the Norwegians have that (or that the US shares those attacks with Norway). (I'm also using BTSync to get "cloud-like" multi-device file sync without needing to rely an _any_ cloud provider. The closed source nature of BTSync doesn't fill me with joy though - I'm experimenting with Tahoe/LAFS, but I'm not prepared to put in the amount of work required to give me access to data stored that way on my phone/iPad…)
- j-g-faustus 13y agoTwo reasons for non-Americans: - the snooping is explicitly targeting foreigners. In USA I'm a foreigner, by hosting in my own country I have at least the protection of being a citizen. - if I don't like the snooping my own government does, I can call my representatives, vote for "less snooping" political candidates, start lobbying etc. In a foreign country like USA I have no rights or leverage whatsoever.
- perlpimp 13y agoNSA and CIA has been used for Industrial espionage purposes in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised if this whole PRISM program was in part for enriching the wealthy and connected even more (and their enterprises). We already moved our servers & data back to Germany right now evaluating few replacements for Google Apps.
- jacquesm 13y ago> evaluating few replacements for Google Apps. Curious about your eventual decision.
- stfu 13y agoJust by the way bureaucracy works you can make it a lot more inconvenient for them by using services of a bunch of different countries just to put your profile together. By rotating free email providers such as mail.ru, free.fr, and so on you can pretty much create a bureaucrat's nightmare - assuming of cause the unlikely cause that this is the weakest link in the chain.
- computer 13y agoOff-topic, but a fun way to take this to the next level: if you have your own domain, you can set mx records with the same priority at different services to randomly scatter your incoming mail. You can then pull them in with pop3 with your mail client or getmail with something like Dovecot to provide a self-hosted IMAP interface. You get the added benefit of having automatic fallbacks if one of your mail services is down.
- sudonim 13y agoWould you really get a random distribution if MX records all had the same priority? Sounds like a fun test & experiment.
- computer 13y agoAs far as I know that's the expected behaviour. I also saw it in practice, although I did not study the exact distribution in much detail. The reason for this behaviour would be that you would normally use this for load balancing. You can normally get the same behaviour by setting one MX record to a local A record (mail.example.com), and then serving several IPs for that A record in a round-robin/random fashion.
- jlgaddis 13y agoYou should (in theory, at least). I can't speak for all DNS servers but BIND will return them in a different order each time it answers an query. For example, the first query returns "mx1, mx2, mx3"; next query returns "mx2, mx3, ms1"; next query returns "mx3, mx1, mx2". Many resolvers seem to simply use the first one so it's roughly equivalent to round robin load balancing.
- papaf 13y agoI don't think that you need to bring countries into this. Ubiquitous surveillance goes hand in hand with corruption and authoritarianism. Cloud services make surveillance easier - get off the cloud and run your own services.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- artichokeheart 13y ago"The level of skepticism was greater than I expected," said Jim Reavis, co-founder and executive director of the CSA. "I had thought that more people would understand that these activities happen all the time in their countries as well." Way to not get the point Mr Reavis
- barking 13y agoWhat this tells the US Gov't is that you can have money or you can have PRISM, but you can't have both. Money (aka 'the pursuit of happiness') medium of exchange and shield against tyranny
- fargolime 13y agoIf US tax revenues fall, then tax rates rise (with concomitant loopholes for the wealthy). Gov't wins either way. The general public takes the hit, as always.
- coldcode 13y agoI hope so.
- MichaelMoser123 13y agovery good; change in policy will come if the big tech companies speak up and state that total snooping is bad for business. If one is all for snooping then the sited argument is 'national security' - a very pressing concern. If one is against snooping then the only argument one has are 'civil rights' - this is a matter of principles, meaning that is not of immediate concern; there is always something more urgent to override matters of principle. If one states that snooping is bad for business then this again moves the argument against snooping into the realm of urgent issues.
- whyme 13y agoWhat's surprising is the lack of alternative services (even outside the US) that clearly state any service they provide will in fact shut down before not being transparent. I have cancelled quite a few services over the last few months, but struggle to find real alternatives. Also, I doubt even transparency in the aggregate would be enough to make me go back into US based offerings.
- vmarsy 13y agoTake a look at http://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud.xml http://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud.xml EC2-like instances are supposed to be released at the end of august.
- whyme 13y agoWhat I'd like to see is a link to their policy supporting transparency for clients.
- bigiain 13y agoI notice they've now got a US based datacenter. With my overly-paranoid hat on, I wonder how much that places their entire business under risk of NSA pressure?
- sudonim 13y agoThey have a North American datacenter in Canada, but nothing in the US. The website makes it seem like they do presumably for marketing reasons.
- flyt 13y agoPretty simple way to frame this in a way that Washington can understand: The NSA data collection programs are _job killers_ for American high-tech workers and its most innovative companies.
- Vivtek 13y agoBut none of their friends. More enemies means more federal funds doled out to Halliburton!
- mikhailt 13y agoNot only that, it will cause us the lead in innovation and technology services. It affects all apps that depend on those cloud services and they are getting yelled at by their customers for not providing better alternatives.
- flyt 13y ago"Hard working, innovative technology companies are losing out to foreign companies due to this unaccountable, big government program. It's time to reign in this anticompetitive NSA behavior and let American business compete on a level playing field." *formatted for a talking head to use on FOX News/MSNBC/CNN
- derefr 13y agoThat's beautiful. Now do company-sponsored/pre-tax health insurance coverage!
- jrockway 13y agoCan't the NSA spy on foreign operations without any legal oversight, as opposed to spying on domestic operations with "oversight" from a secret court? Both are bad.
- glesica 13y agoSince all of the companies fingered as cooperating actively with PRISM were American companies, the assumption is that while the NSA may spy on foreign companies those companies are not actively cooperating with the NSA and it is therefore (in theory, I suppose) harder for the NSA to get at their data.
- beloch 13y agoAfter SOPA, it became clear that the U.S. info sector could no longer neglect its lobbying efforts in Washington. The MPAA and RIAA represent comparatively tiny (in terms of revenue) interests but were only thwarted by the unpredictable (and unreliable) intervention of the public. Now this. The info sector has become big industry and is going to play a correspondingly big role in U.S. politics going forward. They're going to make more campaign contributions, be more involved in the campaigns themselves, and spend more money on lobbyists than ever before. Capitol hill is about to get a whif of silver-dollar grapeshot from a new angle, and those voting to maintain NSA funding are in an exposed position!
- s_q_b 13y agoWe need a well-organized lobbying effort to support the interests of United States internet companies. Those survey numbers are actually astounding. The most surprising thing about lobbying and donation efforts is that they aren't really all that expensive. All it takes is a few hundred thousand to a million to swing a tight election. The amounts aren't that large. Maybe a crowdfunding campaign for a Free Internet PAC?
- rodgerd 13y agoFrom my perspective outside the States, there is already government support, which is the full-court press US ambassadorial staff have been running in Australia and New Zealand to categorise privacy and data sovereignty laws as unfair and illegitimate anti-competition laws whose sole purpose is to prevent companies like Amazon gutting the local IT markets. I imagine they are running the same line in Europe. I wonder what Amazon's relationship with the US government is like?
- s_q_b 13y agoSure, there are some interests that run in the opposite direction. But domestically, the amount of power Silicon Valley and tech centers across the country hold in Washington is not commensurate with their economic and cultural clout. Certainly it is time for that to change.
- dcc1 13y agoIve one server left in US, cancelling it soon, thats 900/month less going into US economy.
- teeja 13y agoGood for you. Thoroughly understandable, that money could help to build infrastructure in your own country. At the same time, the economic cost will undoubtedly help to end this undemocratic insanity, and will make these guys far more sensitive to their endless xenophobia.
- bhauer 13y agoThis is why in my recent rant about how Microsoft could re-establish its relevance [1], one recommendation was that Microsoft differentiate itself as the only tech titan to champion a decentralized cloud. I fairly strongly feel that would be a competitive advantage. (Of course if all self-managed security implemented on Microsoft operating systems can be subverted by the NSA, it's a moot point.) [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
- nivla 13y agoha.. Talk about doing the right thing at the wrong time and wrong thing at the right time. Microsoft is pushing hard to move everything to the cloud. Office, Search, Storage - Skydrive, pretty much your entire desktop by the middle of this decade. Had they stayed put, they could have had a easy bright future. Rule #1: Never follow your competitor in pitch dark.
- hobs 13y agoMicrosoft has such a good relationship with the government that its unlikely to be able to extricate itself to every accomplish that.
- nivla 13y agoBut doesn't Microsoft also have good relationship with other governments? Wouldn't that make them play diplomatic? If Microsoft is found inserting backdoors into their core OS, every other government using their product would dump it for something else. From a business perspective why would someone willingly take that risk?
- krbbltr 13y agoI feel that Apple was in a unique position to do that. As we all know, they make their money from hardware and don't have much interest in taking control of users' data (beyond what is necessery for some nice vendor lock-in of course; not unlike the Microsoft of the distant past). Better yet, they already had popular consumer hardware in place on which they could have built a decentralized cloud service: Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme. They could have just iterated on those devices. But no, they chose instead to build that stupid, useless iCloud thing with the faux linen website. And while they were at it, made their networking hardware worse than before. Maybe there were sound technical reasons for not going the decentralized route (like crappy bandwidth and latency, or increased complexity), but it still feels like a missed opportunity.
- thaumaturgy 13y agoIncidentally, I just had a new customer call to ask about hosting services, because he needs a new mail account and, in his words, "can't trust Google after all the recent news." This guy is an attorney and very far from the tech echo-chamber. I've got a pretty small business in a small town, so when I start hearing about stuff like this from customers, it's usually a pretty good indication that it's gone mainstream.
- sixothree 13y agoUsing google just makes me feel dirty. When it's decision time at my company there are a number of us who will be lobbying against google, skype, dropbox et al.
- tteam 13y agoAt Tonido, we got a following mail from a customer a week back. " We are sorry but recent developments and news in regard to the NSA PRISM program and the Patriot Act have made us decide no longer to use any cloud solution developed or hosted by a US company. You can remove our information from your database." Even though, Our Tonido software is a self hosted one and totally orthogonal to Google Drive or dropbox in principle and in operation, we do get the shaft unfairly.
- krbbltr 13y agoAt this point I think it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that your company might be forced to incorporate hidden backdoors into your software should the NSA ever decide that your customer's data is of value to them. Not your fault, sure. But that's the reality.
- inopinatus 13y agoAs of yesterday I've been noticing various Google applications (Maps in particular, both web and iOS) nagging me to turn on centralised history recording, in order to have any kind of search history or bookmarking. My answer is "hell no", always has been and even more so now; and I can deal with the disappearance of functionality, but the nagging is especially irritating and the timing doubly ironic.
- kingsidharth 13y agoSources? Numbers? Specifics?
- velik_m 13y agoThe biggest danger to the USA tech industry isn't even the customer blowback, which might blow over soon enough. The biggest danger is an opportunity for local competition to lobby the local governments to legitimately regulate US competition out of the market. For instance if the German government demands that all operating systems have to be open source (to prevent backdors) and replaces Windows with something like LiMux (which will of course be serviced by local companies who lobbied) and all companies dealing with citizen data have to use it as well, Microsoft could lose a huge chunk of market almost over night.
- avty 13y agoThis is a great opportunity for non-US based startups to make a killing.
- pinaceae 13y agoso this might happen in the SMB space. but any slightly global corp? just how will that US office be connected? will BMW cut off all of the US? Nestle? Sanofi-Aventis? Heineken? Toyota? if it's on the internet, everyone is snooping it. your traffic crosses swedish borders? swedish intelligence has the right and means to copy everything. haven't seen new routing tables being adjusted to avoid sweden. facebook has their EU datacenter there. it's kneejerk-ish IT admins who are pulling these things right now. who don't understand what having anything connected to the internet really means. any un-encrypted email plus their attachments? that pricelist you just sent your colleague? public. chatting with partners over g2m or skype? public. but sure, the NSA is listening in on your little bikeshop which is using basecamp or mailchimp. core interests of the USA in peril.