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At least for e-mail, I think the idea is to ensure that a cloud provider doesn't have a long backlog of his e-mails. Of course, if the NSA take an interest in h
by takluyver 13y ago
At least for e-mail, I think the idea is to ensure that a cloud provider doesn't have a long backlog of his e-mails. Of course, if the NSA take an interest in him, they'll still find a way to monitor his current e-mails, but this makes it harder for them to pull all his past e-mails. I doubt WebFaction is secretly storing all the e-mail he has deleted, because that costs money, and they can't show advertising next to it.
- superuser2 13y agoWe know that the Five Eyes have ISP-level taps. Why do we think they aren't reading SMTP as it flows across WebFaction's datacenter?
- takluyver 13y agoThey are quite probably reading it, and I think I read something about a buffer of a few days that they kept things for. But they're probably not keeping all of everyone's communications in case they want to refer to them in five years time. Whereas on GMail they can dig back through years of old e-mails as well. At the very least, it adds a small per-person cost to their surveillance, because they have to store copies of e-mails themselves rather than getting Google to do it.