Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130609225334-16549-did-obama-just-destroy-the-u-s-internet-industry?_mSplash=1

by _wk3u • 13 years ago

592 277 13 years ago

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runn1ng• 13 years ago

No.

Because most people don't care about privacy that much. See TSA scanners, foursquare, hell GMail scans your data everytime you read mails, Facebook doesn't even pretend there is a privacy. Damn, first thing any Apple computer do is taking your picture, getting your details and sending it all to Cupertino, before you even load the OS. Android tries to track all your phones under one account you have to add before starting up.

People don't really care about privacy. (Disclaimer: I am no better.)

There will be some anti NSA rallies, sure. Photos of those rallies will be geotagged with EXIF data and posted on tumblr, facebook and twitter from iphones and androids.

yen223• 13 years ago

So true. The real danger here is that it's now easier for foreign governments to justify censoring the web, to "protect us against US invasion of privacy" or something.

Ziomislaw4• 13 years ago

I certainly wouldn't mind if PSA[1] got cut off of the rest of internet.

[1]: Police State of America

coopdog• 13 years ago

I don't care about privacy for my personal (not corporate) information from Google. The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them.

I do care about that an organisation with the power to legally kill or imprison me without trial, with the world's strongest military and a penchant for punishing anyone who embarasses them has all of my data, including who I associate with, what I say and whereever I go. In fact not just my data, the data of their political opponents and the journalists that keep the system honest.

If not Obama, someone at the head of the table is going to abuse this information one day.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them.

No, the worst thing that Google,[1] can do is share that information with credit card companies, HR departments, health insurance companies, etc, who do have the power to ruin your life and are much more likely to do it than the government.

What happens when the advertising money hits the wall and can't support revenue growth sufficient to keep the Wall Street analysts happy? At some point some MBA is going to figure out that HR departments would love to be notified about e.g. their employees joining say a cancer support page. It sounds inconceivable today, but I bet people who started using credit cards in the 1960's and 1970's never expected that one day the various credit organizations would band together and sell your information to literally everyone, so that you could be denied a job because of your credit history.

I think it's important to keep some perspective, and I feel like people on HN aren't doing that here when they direct all their blame to the government over this issue and hold Google, Facebook, etc, who created this surveillance apparatus, blameless. Corporate America is much more likely to screw you over than the government. They have a profit motive to do so, and can get away with screwing you over on a mass scale in a way the government cannot. I don't know a single person who has been screwed over by the government. I do know people who have been screwed over by credit ratings agencies, having job offers revoked because they struggled financially in college.

Maybe it's not inevitable or even very likely that Google and Facebook will sell your information to the highest bidder. But it's a failure of imagination not to pretend that it isn't possible, and if we're going to engage in slippery slope reasoning with respect to the NSA, let's be intellectually honest and admit that we've built a vast surveillance apparatus in both the public and the private sector, and there are numerous entities within both sectors who have the ability and perhaps the motive to use that information to hurt you.

[1] Or Facebook or whatever. It doesn't matter. One day these companies will become mature and will be headed by some MBA who has never written a line of code...

wwweston• 13 years ago

If not Obama, someone at the head of the table is going to abuse this information one day.

I'd worry less about someone at the head of the table -- who has a lot of visibility and responsibility -- and more about the legion of prosecutors and officers (plus their friends they owe favors to) who all have incentives to catch bad guys... whether they're actually bad, or just barely find themselves on the wrong side of an interpretation of some statute, or just fit the profile.

And of course, the occasional less duty-oriented reasons for making your life difficult.

locusm3• 13 years ago

My personal experience with reselling Google Apps here in Australia is quite different, privacy of data is almost always the first or second question they ask. I also rejoiced at AWS coming to Sydney, but having servers physically located in Australia does nothing to protect data by law from the US Govt.

eksith5• 13 years ago

No, because only those who were on the fence were swayed either way. As of right now, the Poll on how the HN community will respond ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846564 ) is at :

  No, I'm ok with it								66 
  
  I'd like to do something but it's too difficult to avoid using cloud services	195 
  
  I'm going to try to use services from non-US companies hosted outside the US	99 
  
  I'm only going to use services that allow client side encryption.		37
  
  I'm going to host all my own services. 					47 
  
  I'm not changing anything because I already assumed all of my data was being 
  monitored anyway.                                                             151

A quick glance at what the rest of the public is thinking is quite illuminating as well.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0609/How-do-Ame...

Summary: People think in terms of "Privacy is a bit like oil. It's getting pricey, but I still like my SUV."

If anything, it may give a much needed boost to an existing sector of internet industry, privacy and security. I see several companies springing up (some already have) that delivery end-to-end encrypted communication and storage over different media (of course, there would be plenty of Snake Oil as well).

The real frontier of communication is the transmission of anonymized and encrypted data with services bought and paid for anonymously as well with no repercussions for the service providers.

nhebb• 13 years ago

I doubt it will have much of an impact, but I'd be reluctant to make a prediction about international growth based on an HN survey and a CS Monitor article that references American polling data.

eksith5• 13 years ago

Fair enough.

My gut feeling is about the same on impact of international growth. On one hand it may have been a blessing in disguise. The Internet is supposed to be global in the first place, but we have massive over-representation in pretty much every aspect of its commercial operation.

The same services outside U.S. jurisdiction and influence are suddenly more alluring.

raganwald2• 13 years ago

"Privacy is a bit like oil. It's getting pricey, but I still like my SUV."

You do know that outside of the US, there are lots of people who don't drive SUVs because of the price of oil?

eksith5• 13 years ago

Not having being born in the U.S. and still having family in several countries, Yes, I do.

The implication is that U.S. Internet Industry is somehow "destroyed" as a result of this is hyperbole. If anything, all it did was give hope to those outside the U.S. that there's still a viable market for the same cloud services (sans FISA leash) even in smaller scales.

jfoutz4• 13 years ago

Yeah, but there are also lots of people who would drive SUVs, but SUVs are impractical. Roads that are hundreds or thousands of years old tend to be very narrow.

EthanHeilman3• 13 years ago

The danger is that foreign governments will recognize that the US is using gmail to spy on them. They may ban the use of gmail or other cloud providers within their national boundaries.

eksith5• 13 years ago

I don't think most governments will go that far for casual usage, however I do see more restrictions on confidential, "official business" communication and storage through these (which, I hope is already the case).

Think of how much disruption would be caused if Hotmail, for instance, was forbidden in addition to Gmail. Many of the early adopters of the web in these countries flocked to the most popular platforms (in addition to their ISP email of course). Having to print new business cards would hardly be the only inconvenience.

arg01• 13 years ago

"If anything, it may give a much needed boost to an existing sector of internet industry, privacy and security. I see several companies springing up (some already have) that delivery end-to-end encrypted communication and storage over different media (of course, there would be plenty of Snake Oil as well)."

I think it's worth pointing out that this sector growing as a result of this will mean that those 195 people who responded "I'd like to do something but it's too difficult to avoid using cloud services" will find it easier and easier to make the switch.

Couple that opinion in the tech community with consumer protection laws that may technically forbid a business from storing customer data on these services and you do have a drive for foreign business to move away from US services.

When your talking about a principle such as a right to privacy that's not something that will disappear from society quicker than the time it takes for businesses competing on this principle can be set up.

jmtame• 13 years ago

From the article you linked to:

"With the latest revelations just days – in some cases, hours – old, it’s too soon to know for sure."

I think it's still too early and I'd wait until all the facts are out. I can't speak for how people in other countries are feeling, but I can say this...

As an American startup founder, I'd be very worried about what my international customers would think if they knew I was working secretly with the U.S. government, publicly denying it, subsequently being caught in my own misleading statements, and allowing the government access to all of their data after I told them it was private. As a customer, I'm happy if you can use that data to serve better ads that are relevant to me. But I would be very angry if it was being served to a foreign government which wants to profile me a certain way, potentially to justify killing or detaining me.

eksith5• 13 years ago

True. We know so far that they've limited the original PRISM scope to major infrastructure providers and social media. This is obvious since that would cast the widest net.

As a startup founder, if your operation does get popular enough to catch the eye of the NSA, realistically there's absolutely nothing you can do to fight it. That's how far ingrained the instruments of our own deconstruction are. And they're buried in plain sight in U.S. law. I don't see that changing overnight with a few amendments or acts introduced here and there. It would take an overhaul of the very principles of government we've taken for granted (and quite possibly never really existed).

The fact that we're aware of this aspect of hopelessness will, in the end, be far more damaging to the U.S. economy than any foreign entities being aware of it.

After all, why would American founders found and base anything on U.S. territory if they cannot do it freely and on their own terms? They'd rather found a startup in Hong Kong.

qntmfred• 13 years ago

No I don't think Obama did anything.

starchitect2• 13 years ago

How's that hole in the sand? Seeing anything good down there?

csdreamer7• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more.

sage_joch• 13 years ago

Given that civil liberties were such a big part of his 2008 campaign, the best case scenario you describe is still a bit of a problem. I'm actually pretty angry at him right now. I donated a lot to his campaign in 2008 based on his focus on civil liberties, and he has only escalated everything I disliked about Bush. (And yes, I realize he made some questionable votes in the Senate before the 2008 election. I told myself it was what he had to do to get elected. By the 2012 election I had wised up and voted third party.)

bdcravens• 13 years ago

A core principle of politics is that you're responsible for everything that happens on your watch. If you don't believe that, go listen to the past 40 years of broadcasted debates, and count the number of things that the opponent didn't personally do but was called to account for.

throwaway9848• 13 years ago

I swear, it's like nobody ever read the USA PATRIOT act, even though its been law for 12 years. Obama's fault? For what, following the laws that Congress passed?

kcorbitt• 13 years ago

I don't think it will have that big an impact.

The thing is that the grassroots organizers in other countries who care most about government spying tend to live in countries with much more meddling than that which the US government has demonstrated through PRISM. So compared to a locally-run service, keeping data in the US cloud is likely still much safer. I don't see Google handing over an activist's email logs to the Turkish government, whereas an email service based in Turkey could be strongarmed into it.

A legitimate, non-rhetorical question: does an activist in Turkey care whether the US government reads his/her emails, as long as they don't share them with Turkey?

jfoutz4• 13 years ago

Betteridge's law in action

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

parennoob2• 13 years ago

I don't see why this is the most downvoted option. It does seem on point that the piece doesn't have any hard polling data about worldwide reactions to the recent NSA revelations, and the stuff about alternative services mostly refer to Chinese competitors, who are large players locally, but not worldwide. Hence, you'd think Betteridge's law was applicable. No?

jfoutz4• 13 years ago

I never noticed till someone pointed the law out on HN this year. IMHO the trailing question mark is almost always lazy writing.

jlgreco• 13 years ago

Just for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5852146

jfoutz4• 13 years ago

That is brilliant.

I still think headlines with question marks are cowardly writing. Be bold! Take a stand! Come right out and say Betteridge's law is bullshit.

I kinda get the socratic effect the author is going for, but i still think it's a cheap trick. I didn't ask that question, the author did.

raganwald2• 13 years ago

It's odd, I hear people saying, "no big deal, nothing will change." But then I wonder, if you're saying it's no big deal, are you an American or not?

The point of this pst is that foreign business will be affected, AFAICT, Europeans have always held the Internet to a stricter standard than Americans and have passed stricter laws around everything from what data can be retained to the behaviour of tracking cookies.

If you've posted a "no big deal" comment, can you please go back and tell us whether you are an American or not.

noerps2• 13 years ago

On consumers I would not expect much change to any other non-us service that keeps you invested and locked-in. There simply are no alternatives, some european services are currently shutting down.

Even Schneier is stating that if you aren't connected with us social media, you simply stop to exist for certain groups of people. That rule applies to nearly every european user too.

davros• 13 years ago

I think its a big deal. I'm not American. I don't think things will change - at first.

The leading US internet companies are all built on a foundation of trust. Undermining that trust counterbalances the convenience of their services and over time new competitors without these trust problems are only a click away.

skylan_q• 13 years ago

It's odd, I hear people saying, "no big deal, nothing will change." But then I wonder, if you're saying it's no big deal, are you an American or not?"

There is a fear of having guns taken, but there is an even greater fear of using them against the regime.

tippytop• 13 years ago

I think it will change things; I'm an American. Having your customers trust is important for business---now data stored offshore has just become a feature.

a3n3• 13 years ago

I'm an American, and I think things will change - for the worse. I'd like to think that if morality or the Constitution didn't stop this shit, at least bidness would.

But I think what will really happen is that the administration, and the bureaucrats, and the security "services" in general will double down, be much more secretive about what they do, be much better at what they do (grants coming soon to a computer science department near you), be much more aggressive to prosecute and intimidate whistle blowers, and put more layers on the stonewall of denial.

The government has become self aware.

conanbatt• 13 years ago

I dont think its the kind of thing that affects things commercially in a visible or predictable way. One of my first impression is that its humbling. Web companies are the ones that brag the msot about "building a better world" and this time there was collaboration to make it worse. I think the best or biggest change that could happen is better Whistleblower laws and protection (or high level of exposure to produce more).

wisty2• 13 years ago

It's not just about what people think. It's also whether they think hosting stuff on US servers is even legal.

I can imagine the Pirate Party suing some EU groups (governments, companies, whatever) because they are using US providers, and the US is not safe enough to conform with EU privacy law. And there's money on the line too, lots of EU companies will want the contracts that are going to US ones. And keeping jobs onshore is always popular with the masses.

snowwrestler2• 13 years ago

Europeans tend to have higher standards for protecting the privacy of the personal data of their citizens from access and use by private corporations.

But what the U.S. NSA is doing is sifting data for connections to foreigners who are suspected of being terrorists. I would be shocked if Euro intelligence agencies are not doing the same thing.

jacques_chester6• 13 years ago

"Everybody's doing it!" isn't really a good excuse once you turn about 12 years old.

Sami_Lehtinen5• 13 years ago

At least Sweden is publicly and legally doing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law

flyinRyan4• 13 years ago

But what the U.S. NSA is doing is sifting data for connections to foreigners who are suspected of being terrorists.

Demonstrably false. All of the terrorist laws are mostly used for drug enforcement and the like. They get nearly no terrorist usage because there are nearly no terrorists.

Sami_Lehtinen5• 13 years ago

At least Sweden is openly telling that FRA is allowed to legally monitor all international network traffic.

Sami_Lehtinen5• 13 years ago

Study it: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/

Silhouette4• 13 years ago

I run businesses in the UK that deal with personal data and sometimes use US companies to do so.

There is a specific provision intended to fix the problem of exporting personal data outside the EEA to be processed in the US, which would otherwise be prohibited because US laws are inadequate in this area: the US Department of Commerce operates a Safe Harbor scheme, recognised by the European authorities, which US businesses can participate in to demonstrate that they handle data with sufficient care to satisfy European standards.

The problem is that if the US government is going to permit itself to access data contrary to the claimed protections anyway, then the Safe Harbor scheme is demonstrably unfit for purpose, and any legal shield it provides to European businesses that want to use US-based services to process personal data is in doubt.

This problem is hardly a new discovery, but until recently, the issue was being dealt with quietly, with European officials making occasional mutterings about being in contact with the US government to resolve the conflict here. As of the past week, I'm not sure that's going to carry much weight any more.

This leaves a paradoxical position for any business wanting to operate legally in both the US and Europe. It's not clear whether the huge players like Google or Facebook could avoid the problem by changing their corporate structures, if doing so means that a parent organisation in the US would not be required to disclose personal data held and processed only in Europe by a separate European legal entity under European data protection law. In practice, this might be worse news for US businesses that aren't yet big enough to play the corporate structures lottery, and for those European companies who benefit from services provided by such companies and might have to make other plans. Obviously quite a few smaller Internet services well known on HN would fall into that category.

If you'd asked me a year ago how the paradox would be resolved, I would probably have cynically suggested that the EU authorities would ask how high when the US authorities told them to jump, as they have done previously with things like travel and banking data. But now that this has become a major public issue that people are actually talking about, any attempt to do that seems likely to turn out very badly for European authorities whose popularity is already at an all-time low. I suspect far more Europeans resent the constant privacy intrusions and security theatre of modern life than many across the Atlantic may realise, probably because the consequences of excessive state surveillance are still within living memory in many European countries, and because all around the Med we've been watching timely reminders playing out over the past 2-3 years.

facorreia• 13 years ago

I'm Brazilian and in the corporate and government space there is considerable resistance to hosting systems and data outside our jurisdiction. What I don't think people have fully realized yet is that American companies are subject to the Patriot Act wherever the operate, so even data stored in Brazil might be exported by them to USA authorities without the customers being notified. I ask myself, how far does this extend? Not only to online services, but even to mainframes and storage systems? Application software? Operating systems?

starchitect2• 13 years ago

The biggest problem with this article is that the only competitors the author can find who might supplant the US ones are located in China. Don't see US tech hegemony fading anytime soon, Prism or no Prism.

brown9-2• 13 years ago

The author is guilty of thinking that the president is King, as if the entire federal government and all three branches weren't behind these things for that past 7 years.

JamisonM• 13 years ago

The headline "Has the US Government's History of Acting Against its own Stated Values in the Protection of Civil Liberties and Privacy" is not nearly punchy enough to attract the desired clicks though.

The window ain't just 7 years, it stretches a lot further back than that.

purephase2• 13 years ago

Nothing will change.

If you think that those involved were not prepared for the eventually of a leak, you'd be very naive. The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes. Contingency plans have been put in place for this eventuality and the people making these plans are experts at dealing with these situations.

My guess is that the gameplan for the US government will be to stay silent and wait for general apathy to sink back in. Tomorrow is WWDC and, with the latest Apple news, the tech community rally will likely fall to 2-3 page in a week or so and then disappear altogether. Once that happens, the difficulty moving to alternate services (as per the other HN poll) will shadow everything, and the company bottom lines will be unaffected.

Add to that, if you believe that the US government and institutions are the only ones doing this, that would be even more naive. The Mossad, SIS, CSIS, KGB etc. are likely implementing very similar policies and procedures, if not directly involved with PRISM (or whatever it is actually called) and the outsourcing companies providing it. The likelihood of finding other territorial based services with capability, scale in an area not under surveillance is probably close to impossible.

The Arab Spring was a wake-up call to all governments/multi-nationals that these tools are power in the hands of the general public and steps were taken to mitigate and reduce this effectiveness.

It's depressing. I wish it were otherwise. I wish the companies involved actually had the ability to push back or outright deny involvement in these types of actions, but I suspect their hands were tied.

Silicon Valley is entrenched. We like to think that it is still our playground but we should know better. My only hope is that this time we learn and that brighter people than I figure out what we can do about it.

danilocampos• 13 years ago

The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes.

Can you show your work on this? How would we know this?

obstacle1• 13 years ago

A bunch of people compared ~9 of the companies' statements in a past thread. They are all identical in structure, form, and style, with only minor differences like differing adjectives and emphases. They all also beat the exact same terminology to death. Namely, "direct access".

wisty2• 13 years ago

You don't care. I don't care. The EU companies which are running systems on US-based SAS platforms care.

purephase2• 13 years ago

That's an assumption. The fact remains, the ability to move to other countries is a fallacy in that the rest are looking at or are implementing very similar strategies.

Ankaios• 13 years ago

Tomorrow is WWDC and, with the latest Apple news, the tech community rally will likely fall to 2-3 page in a week or so and then disappear altogether.

Perhaps use that to gain more attention. Picket the WWDC.

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

One biggie that the author left out of the piece:

The US Gov continues to insist that they are not monitoring the data of US citizens because that would be unconstitutional without warrants. But that's a tacit admission that they are openly monitoring the data of non-US citizens. I think this is one of the most important revelations of this leak, the US Gov has made it clear that if you are a non US citizen using a web service based in the US your data is definitely under observation.

zainny2• 13 years ago

As an Australian, that's what I found most interesting as well about all the commentary going on. From the perspective of the NSA it seems my data is fair game under any and all circumstances.

Well fuck that. Google, Amazon, et al. - I'm out

dsowers• 13 years ago

Good luck. I don't see other countries innovating at even half the rate of the U.S. with tech stuff. Leaving the umbrella will be like turning out the lights. It gets boring and cold in the dark after a while.

a3n3• 13 years ago

I don't expect non-Americans to be all that familiar with my country, and vice versa.

But think about it. The NSA has been around since 1952. They now have N billions of dollars of black budget. The relevant Congressional oversight committees are prohibited from talking about what they learn. They are (supposedly) constitutionally prohibited from spying on Americans. If they aren't (or say the aren't) spying on Americans, then they're spying on y'all.

Some of it, plus the rest of it, equals all of it. We're some of it. Venn says y'all are the rest of it.

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

Well obviously many governments have spies. There's even a genre of entertainment constructed around spies. And generally in the spy narrative the spy is after guys from the other country, not his own.

The revelation here is that if you are a non-American your data that you store via a company based in the US is available to the US government with virtually (maybe even literally?) no protections. And this isn't tin foil paranoia, the US Government just told you that in public discourse.

jacques_chester6• 13 years ago

They'll be doing something like the old Echelon trick.

US spy agencies can't spy on Americans, so they spy on Australians, Canadians and Britons. In return, Australians spy on Americans, Britons on Canadians etc etc. Then they swap intelligence and get to claim that "we didn't spy, it was given to us by our allies who are under no such regulations".

einhverfr18• 13 years ago

There's still a major limit there. The issue of the Verizon and PRISM systems is that they probably involve the possibility at least of legal authority over the vendors. Court orders or possibilities of court orders....

If the NSA is spying on Australians clandestinely, then they don't have that authority and they are limited to what they can scavange. It would be far better if we were to a point where no courts would coerce cooperation of this sort, and the system you are describing is better than what we have. The problem is when the NSA gets a court to forcibly deputize an American business to spy on Australians, and that's a very, very different problem.

DannyBee7• 13 years ago

I'm not entirely sure why you think a non-us citizen using a web service in the non-us is not similarly targeted?

Either by other intelligence agencies, or even more likely, that the NSA shares these abilities with other friendly foreign governments (UK, NZ, AUS, etc) in order to ensure their tacit approval.

Even in the world of intelligence, diplomacy matters. Secrecy only counts for so much. You can't keep the fact that you have a huge listening post in NZ secret, huge dishes don't look like they belong in cow pastures. Same with fiber optic cable. It's not like they can splice them without someone noticing. Instead, the way you accomplish this is by providing NZ what it wants while still retaining plausible deniability if things go south for them ("We had no idea the horrible NSA had secretly placed all this stuff here. We're completely outraged!")

parennoob2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how common this is on this site, but I happen to be an HN reader the vast majority of whose friends in the US and across the world don't know or follow technology/security stuff.

Out of my 600-odd 'friends' on Facebook, one (1) is posting stuff about the NSA allegations. The other 599, are posting pictures of cats, music videos, snaps from vacation, reflections about life, et cetera. I myself am extremely reticent about posting on Facebook due to the recent revelations.

As a result, I am afraid Edward Snowdon's fears might come to pass, atleast in the short run. Not enough people care. They crave the short-term dopamine bursts that result from people liking their posts, or pictures, or videos. Getting them to set that aside and care about the fact that the Government might potentially have access to it all is a very, very hard task.

In order to do this, you have to get people to switch en masse to new, secure social protocols. In short, you have to build a Facebook alternative, an client-side encrypted webmail service, or a document sharing site that JustWorks, is secure, and doesn't require any terminal commands to access / run. Otherwise the majority of the population is going to use products from Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. You can use your encrypted webmail and identi.ca, but very few people outside the "tech-aware" world will communicate with you.

noerps2• 13 years ago

I really concur and like to add there are now one or two generations of young adults and their kids out there, who have never even considered privacy (as in non-exhibitionism).

decasteve• 13 years ago

I'm Canadian. I'll be locking down my communications as best I can: email (GPG), instant messaging, chat, etc. I'd like to see my American neighbours do the same and hold their politicians feet the fire over this.

I feel like I should boycott the US companies on the list, at least to some degree. I have made the switch to DuckDuckGo and Mozilla. A Blackberry, as opposed to Android, will be my next smartphone. As a developer I'll be dropping my iOS support in the coming weeks. I haven't used a Microsoft product, including Skype, in a long time (exclusively Linux). I will likely phase out Google Drive and Gmail as well.

Not sure how many of my compatriots will follow suit or if that will have an impact financially.

There are lots of recommendations out there now to lock-down your browser, e.g. adblock/https/etc, if you haven't already. If this becomes mainstream then advertisers like Google may take a hit.

I'll be emailing my member of parliament (MP) to make sure we keep tabs on this in Canada, and keep our privacy laws intact.

devb• 13 years ago

How do you plan on telling everyone you communicate with, "I'm sorry, this channel is unencrypted, this conversation cannot continue."

Why aren't companies scrambling to provide a plug-in encryption product? Forget Google's default https, I want easy end user encryption.

wildmXranat• 13 years ago

Same here.

Ill be looking to expedite my move off of gmail, yahoo, rackspace etc. It's a shame , but it has to be done.

I'm doing some active research into sending an effective letter my my MP as well as I would like to have it as much weight as possible.

geoka9• 13 years ago

I'll be emailing my member of parliament (MP) to make sure we keep tabs on this in Canada, and keep our privacy laws intact.

openmedia.org seems to have done a good job campaigning against the Online Spying Bill.

shirro• 13 years ago

I think most people with some technical savvy have already concluded that everything on the Internet is potentially subject to surveillance, both government and corporate. You can mitigate the impact on your privacy to some extent by going offline or using crypto but not totally. People need to choose what to share, when and with whom. The people who are loudly shouting on social media about the evils of government interception are still shouting on social media where everything they have ever said or done is able to be mined and analysed. Nothing really has changed except perhaps the perceptions of the naive.

jval• 13 years ago

This is a huge deal. I live in Australia and I have been running businesses on the cloud for the last 3 years or so. I have rarely heard the issue of the PATRIOT Act raised and in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted.

Those days are most certainly over. This stuff will affect companies like AWS and Rackspace the most, given that they are competing for contracts with companies who are seriously concerned about who can get at their data. I imagine nobody will flaunt the laws in Australia regarding international data transfers in future, and that countries where no such laws exist will enact some very quickly.

Any cloud based software company in the US which holds large amounts of data that could in any way be deemed to be sensitive is going to have a much harder time pitching to clients overseas who will increasingly opt for a decent local alternative over a foreign one should the option exist. The only thing that American companies can hope for otherwise is that there is no foreign alternative.

The world is not going to come to an end but for a lot of people, their jobs are about to get much harder and the government should be worried about this.

vertis• 13 years ago

I'm, also in Australia.

NB: It's a real struggle to not make this sound paranoid.

Just at an individual level, I'm questioning whether it's wise to store my data in a US service that won't afford me the same protection as US citizens.

I've already started reducing my reliance on Google, and I barely use facebook, but things like Amazon and Linode are much harder for me to quickly divorce myself from.

chewxy• 13 years ago

If you're willing to pay a bit more, there are companies like Ninefold

But then again, that is just talk. I still use AWS and Linode religiously. The prices are really hard to beat

aragot• 13 years ago

I'm questioning whether it's wise to store my data in a US service

It definitely isn't, and I'm wondering why this issue wasn't on top of your mind before that?

reeses3• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, Oz is one of our spying partners, so your ASIO is probably just annoyed that the NSA can't keep its house in order.

gizzlon• 13 years ago

The others I can understand, bur Linode? What about something like hetzner? Just checked, and their VPs have more ram and more HDD but only one core: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserv...

Aanyway, I though these hosting companies where a dime a dozen?

BoyWizard• 13 years ago

in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted.

I can tell you from working in the finance industry in Australia and APEA, larger companies/banks take this very seriously due to compliance obligations with regulators (APRA, MAS, HKMA, etc).

hemancuso• 13 years ago

Agreed.

I am surprised that Amazon, Rackspace et. al. aren't coming out and letting their customers know where they stand in all of this.

hackula1• 13 years ago

Pleading the fifth apparently...

lawnchair_larry2• 13 years ago

You shouldn't be surprised about Amazon. They pulled the plug on wikileaks as a favor, and they give the CIA their own private $600M cloud:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/03/21/amazo...

reeses3• 13 years ago

As Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! have demonstrated so far, a company can only make itself look worse by making any statement.

Any denial will be rejected as dissembling or sophistry and admissions of complicity would be suicidal.

jacques_chester6• 13 years ago

Australia isn't exactly a safe haven. There are only a handful of pipes in and out of the country, each of them probably well within the deep packet inspection capability of serious spy gear. I'd be amazed if one of the AFP, ACC, ASIS, ASIO or DSD didn't have their own rooms in selected Telstra and Optus facilities.

And not to mention that Conroy wants to do something like what the NSA are supposedly doing; he's just going to outsource it to the ISPs.

I've seen an AFP server in a certain government datacentre. Its security was a square of black and yellow tape and the assurance that I would be detained without charge under anti-terrorism legislation if I crossed the tape to take a closer look.

greendestiny3• 13 years ago

But as an Australian citizen we have our courts and public opinion to try and fight for us. Not to mention the people doing the snooping have far less incentive to pass commercial information along to a competitor.

lawnchair_larry2• 13 years ago

I think the issue for foreign governments is closer to countries not wanting other countries to have easy reach into their data. For them it's not a civil liberties issue, it's a security issue.

taspeotis• 13 years ago

Australian here. Government departments are slowly starting to catch on to this sort of thing.

One application I work on stores data from DEEWR and FaHCSIA and this year they've "cracked down" on that data going overseas.

The application's data (and the bits we get back from the government) has always been stored in Australia on our hardware. My understanding is that some of our competitors using AWS and Rackspace had to work hard to quickly get their stuff hosted locally (or are in the process of bringing it back here).

You can get an idea of what DEEWR expects providers using cloud services to adhere to from here: http://foi.deewr.gov.au/documents/policy-use-cloud-hosted-so...

philwelch• 13 years ago

Wasn't Australia already implicated as a collaborator in ECHELON?

i_am_dead• 13 years ago

Yes Australia runs a SIGINT collection point for the NSA, at least since the 90s.

einhverfr18• 13 years ago

My latest startup is Efficito (a Limited Company, registered in the UK). The web site is http://www.efficito.com and our servers are all in Europe. We have built the service up with a very careful eye for security (why we are going hosted cloud first, and multi-tenant is still in the works).

You have just given me what I think is a very good possibility regarding a marketing message, namely that we are not subject to NSA orders, and that we take security extraordinarily seriously. We are still looking into whole disk encryption for virtual instances, but key management is a non-trivial problem there to get right. For those who want it I can be pretty sure we'd be happy to work with you to find a way of making the system meet your needs. (Of course given a few customers, we could work with a server in Australia too.)

But I also think it goes beyond shipping the data overseas. Suppose you do business with an American company that has servers in Australia (for the record we are registered in the UK, not the US), and they get a FISA warrant? Of course they will send the info over. So you can't only look at where the business's servers are but also where what legal authorities they are obviously subject to.

Silhouette4• 13 years ago

You have just given me what I think is a very good possibility regarding a marketing message, namely that we are not subject to NSA orders, and that we take security extraordinarily seriously.

You certainly won't be the first with that idea. I've now lost count of how many blog posts, tweets, forum posts and so on I've seen in the past week that essentially say, "Is the next big selling point for European service companies that we're not subject to US laws?"

dmix• 13 years ago

The UK has quite a strong military sector with their own secret agencies and a strong relationship with America.

Could that make them capable of similar monitoring? Does the UK have stronger information privacy laws that the US doesn't?

AlexeiSadeski4• 13 years ago

If you're outside of the US, then yes you are not subject to NSA orders. But your data will still be accessed by the NSA, as the NSA won't require an order to read what you've got.

atirip• 13 years ago

"Suppose you do business with an American company that has servers in Australia (for the record we are registered in the UK, not the US), and they get a FISA warrant? Of course they will send the info over"

There's a way out. Those server offshore must be handled by subsidiary. Then the parent company in US does not have the data and they can not also command subsidiary to handle it over.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

The UK is not exactly an ideal location to make a fuss about this from, given that the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (2000) gives extensive rights to the government to demand covert surveillance, which includes requirements of confidentiality over interception warrants to the extent that they in some circumstances can not even be revealed in court.

On top of that Part III of RIPA makes it an offense to fail to disclose your encryption keys to the government in certain circumstances, and the court does not need to actually prove that you have the keys in order to sentence you for failure to produce them.

MoOmer• 13 years ago

Before anyone else gets this idea, I'd encourage you to look at your organizations' resident country laws before thinking & acting on this.

Companies based in the UK, for example, can not make the claim found above ( http://m.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-m...).

I'm not a lawyer, but you could lose all credibility if you act on that and get it wrong.

downandout2• 13 years ago

There are technological solutions to address this for US firms. Encryption on the client side, before data is sent to the cloud, would work. I would suspect (hope) that browser makers will quickly introduce features that make sending and receiving end-to-end encrypted communications (email etc.) a thoughtless process - since that is the only way to get people to use it.

Even better, perhaps someone will write software that sits on top of the network stack and automatically negotiates secure communications regardless of the origin client software. Maybe some sort of public key registry might come into play.

dreamfactory• 13 years ago

I think it will impact B2B e.g. big/sensitive projects will be much less inclined to use Skype.

buzu• 13 years ago

I live in the UK and for me this is a big deal. While this issue was always in the back of my mind, I never had concrete proof that this was happening.

Now that my fears have been answered, I shall think twice before buying any cloud space on US companies servers. I will be speaking to my colleagues on the effects this will on our existing data and how will this effect the trust with our customers.

I think this is a huge deal.

bifrost• 13 years ago

I don't think he's capable of destroying it, but he's certainly set things back quite a ways. We've known about domestic internet spying for quite some time, but its definately gotten bigger and badder under the current administration.

I hope people finally will stop with the "oh but nobody is looking at my stuff" attitude, because now they know BigBrother(tm) is watching.

rdl2• 13 years ago

IMO it should be a much bigger deal for totally commodity services (IMAP/SMTP, file storage, etc.) vs. "unique" services (it's not like you could run your own Facebook server in Iceland...)

notimetorelax2• 13 years ago

There are local social networks, to give an example from Russia: vk.com, odnoklassniki.ru, etc. And these are more popular than Facebook.

rdl2• 13 years ago

Social networks aren't commodities, especially once your set of friends are on them.

etherael• 13 years ago

Another data point, I have used a ton of cloud services from US companies in the past with an attitude of not really being comfortable with it based on a belief that something like what was discovered was probably happening but it was just too damned convenient and easy to ignore.

I still made efforts to secure what mattered, like truecrypt containers on dropbox et al, but at the end of the day I just shouldn't have played the game at all. Lending economic support to this kind of behaviour is not acceptable.

I'm conflicted about this because I'm convinced that generally speaking, Dropbox and Google and various other companies that have no other choice than to behave in this way are otherwise really worth supporting.

I am as we speak setting up dedicated hosting with encrypted storage and obfuscated service paths to migrate all my existing services onto something I can reliably control, starting with gmail and dropbox.

I really should have just done this a long time ago, but it becoming abundantly clear that my suspicions were completely justified pushed me over the edge.

gulfie• 13 years ago

No, this sort of thing has been going on long before Obama. If anything he will just be the one that got unlucky enough to be in charge when people found out some of the details.

Sami_Lehtinen5• 13 years ago

Nothing new at all, history just repeating itself. Everything mentioned in this article was already assumed by people. I did laugh when they aid we don't do domestic spying. I think they don't know in US how many people in the world are living outside the all mighty US. Maybe it's just bad geography and limited national political thinking.

asperous• 13 years ago

The good news is, if we make this a big deal and companies start to feel the pressure, we'll have millions of lobbying dollars on our side.

kjackson2012• 13 years ago

Is it true that Google does not protect the rights of non-US users from having their emails read and copied by the NSA?

If that is the case, then why would any foreigner ever use Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc?

Ziomislaw4• 13 years ago

because they are uninformed

einhverfr18• 13 years ago

I am an American and I just want to point out that my latest startup (http://www.efficito.com) is a Limited UK company, and my co-founder is from the Netherlands. It would certainly be to my advantage if things change. We offer cloud-based ERP, and you might be interested to know our main hosting server is currently in the Czech Republic. We are also paranoid about security (all access is encrtpted, and we are looking at encrypted storage for virtual machines, and much more).

I would love for things to change. I really would. What I worry though is about attention span of even decision makers on the business side, and what the alternatives are. The ideal situation would be a bunch of smaller private social networks able to interop (the Diaspora model) but it isn't clear there is a financial way to make this work.

So I hope it changes. I really do. I just am somewhat pessimistic :-P

buro95• 13 years ago

I'm a UK citizen with a startup http://microco.sm that has gone to some lengths to avoid US domains, companies and laws.

All of our domains are EU based, the company is UK based, and whilst we've used Linode for blog and basic site-hosting and will use Cloudflare for CDN, we are putting nothing on the server of a US company that could be a risk to privacy.

All of our data we are keeping within the EU which we feel holds much better standards and has stricter laws on data protection, and for user-generated content we feel that the EU E-commerce Act is better than the DMCA and risk created by the copyright lobby in the US.

Ultimately what this means is that for our core data and API, European companies with no US parent or holding company will win our hosting business.

We will still use US companies, but in a way that is little more than transport and performance increases for US-based users. But even then, we are not requiring real identity and we are implementing SSL everywhere and are happy if users use VPNs or Tor to connect.

Why all the fuss? I believe that through a persons' interests one can determine political affiliation. So I believe that to allow people to organise themselves freely around their hobbies and pastimes, that we must consider this and protect them from any entities that might use that information against the individuals. Further I believe that when people of shared interest come together that they are likely to organise to protect and preserve that interest, and this means that interest groups galvanise ad-hoc lobby groups and activists.

I also hope it changes, but I'm going to act as if I believe it will get worse on all fronts.

buro95• 13 years ago

What I'm saying is that I foresee a hybrid approach in which company data officers will help guide all identifiable data and transactions to EU or local sovereign cloud companies, and that only data that is not personally identifiable, containing company secrets or in the form of aggregated data will be stored on US-linked cloud companies.

This seems to be the best approach and respects EU data protection laws, consumer expectations and rights, and still offers the company flexibility on choosing based on price/performance.

blibble2• 13 years ago

you'll be putting all your traffic through cloudflare?

if they do your SSL termination that makes all your careful US-avoidance completely redundant.

additionally, if you include some JS hosted on cloudflare, then that's susceptible to being tapped by the US intelligence agencies too.

warrick• 13 years ago

What does this have to do with Obama? Genuine question, the article doesn't say. I thought this was a consequence of the Patriot Act.

u23283• 13 years ago

I think 'destroyed' is a strong word, and it's still early. Damaged? That's probably fair.

I wonder if that's a major reason the Google-centric 'The Internship' movie kinda bombed this weekend. I mean, it might just be a crappy movie (didn't see the reviews), but I do suspect a lot of people weren't really into seeing a movie about Google after all this.

psbp• 13 years ago

The average movie-goer wouldn't make the association unless the story were in the headlines for weeks, maybe months, on end. It just doesn't look like a great movie.

u23283• 13 years ago

Heh, you're probably right.

u23283• 13 years ago

Hey Europeans, does this mean your love affair with Skype is over?

zmmmmm• 13 years ago

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.

siculars• 13 years ago

Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.

DannyBee7• 13 years ago

This is likely the root of the issue, which is that they probably capture all communications, but when they have a foreign target, that is when they actually "look" at the stuff they captured, trying to find stuff "related" to that foreign target.

The NSA at least was supposedly run as a very tight ship (I have no idea now, i have no friends who have worked there recently), so I'm sure they theoretically have really detailed redaction and other procedures meant to keep personal or private info of americans from appearing in reports, but that is not exactly comforting.

jmadsen• 13 years ago

That's what I've been wondering:

- if they aren't targeting specific persons, how do they know what country the person is from & if they (the govt) are violating the law?

- if I'm American living in another country, am I safer from or more likely to be tracked (terrorism aside) Am I being picked up "freely" as someone from outside the country?

- many, many, many similar questions I'm sure you are also asking

I realize these seem rather naive questions, but my first thought on reading Obama's response was, "How can you possibly know what country the person is a citizen of?"

Considering that that was a major part of his defense - "Don't worry, it's only those foreign people we're looking at"- I really think that needs to be a bigger part of the whole discussion.

I think it is quite obviously more bullshit.

chad_oliver• 13 years ago

I have heard (no guarantees) that they collect information on everyone, and analyse it later as it is needed. They only investigate this information if and as if relates to a foreign suspect.

Doesn't seem like there's any way to abuse this .....

joering2• 13 years ago

Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.

I think you were just trolling but if not then one of hundreds possible ways to find that:

1. get a hold of your your email (or name and then facebook / gmail snoop)

2. your email leads to your paypal account

3. your paypal account leads to your dob and ssn, bank accounts

4. your banks accounts hold information whether you are citizen or not;

- OR -

4. your ssn codification tells whether by the time obtaining the number you were citizen or not

PayPal, Facebook and Palantr has the same co-owner, P. Thiel.

But seriously I don't think they discriminate. Last thing they look at is whether you are citizen or not. Your IPs (all the one you ever used while login to any website you have an account with) can quickly tell them whether you are on US soil or not. Most likely as long as you are here, you are consider us citizen, whether lawfully or not but you "operate" on US soil so the same rules apply to you. Good example would be if you are in US as a tourist -- you still need to obey US laws and regulations.

grey-area2• 13 years ago

Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.

According to the whistleblower, they don't in any meaningful sense. They collect all the data they can, and then currently only use bits of it, when they feel that is justified. His point about checking the US president's email in the video was that all they need is one email from a foreigner in order to tie anyone in the US to an investigation, and look through all their records.

glesica• 13 years ago

I can't speak for others, but as far as I am concerned, every person on earth has the exact same rights. I see no difference between an American and someone from another country. This informs my stance on all of US foreign policy. To me, spying on an innocent Iraqi or Chinese citizen is just as morally reprehensible as spying on an innocent American citizen. That being said, not all people feel as I do, and you are right, the legality of it all, unfortunately, hinges on how Americans are affected.

DannyBee7• 13 years ago

At least in most countries, this is just not the way it works, legally.

Every country has different rights for citizens and non-citizens.

For example, the US has held the 4th amendment does not apply to non-citizens who are not "part of the national community" (IE if a bunch of canadians came down and fished every weekend, you could search them however without violating the 4th amendment. If they lived here illegally, you couldn't).

It's not just the US of course, almost all countries are like this (the EU has broader protections for EU citizens than random other people, like US citizens living in the EU).

I don't remember all the details, and i certainly agree with "morally reprehensible", but you are suggesting a "natural rights" based approach, which, while common, but not universal.

einhverfr18• 13 years ago

I think a better way to look at it is that rights are cultural, but that if we are serious about living in a decent and respectful world we should in our actions extend to others the rights we want to have ourselves.

Does free speech extend to advocating going out and killing all African Americans at a white supremacist rally? In the US it does, but only because of our bad experiences during the Red Scares. In Canada or the EU it wouldn't. What right do either side have to force their definitions on the other?

This being said, the argument can easily be made that spying is somewhat different. The general fear is that since governments monopolize violence their actions towards spying on their own must be more restrained than spying on others because the dangers in adopting a "show me the man and I will find you the crime" apply at home to a much greater degree than they apply abroad.

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

To me, spying on an innocent Iraqi or Chinese citizen is just as morally reprehensible as spying on an innocent American citizen.

Prepare to be jumped on by "anti-imperialists".

reeses3• 13 years ago

I suspect the primary reason we (in the USA) are focusing so much on it is that these are the people appointed, promoted, funded, etc., by people we elected. Some people think that has meaning while many are cynical enough to think that they're all the same under the various masks.

This is a revelation for most people, especially younger people, and they're dealing with the immediate, personal, consequences.

As with the embarrassment created by the second Bush administration, whereby we squandered a great deal of global goodwill after 9/11, we've done a stellar job of undoing the redemption we thought we had gained by electing Obama in 2008.

Many Americans really thought we could be less embarrassed of our leadership with that decision.

The story is still unfolding. Our government will be measured by how it acts out the next few months and how it responds to the inevitable criticism from the rest of the world. As Americans, we will be measured by how we respond to our government.

einhverfr18• 13 years ago

But it is also that it is far easier for the police who have lots of surveillance to jail their own citizens than to swoop in and jail foreigners. The risk of abuses are there in both cases but they are orders of magnitude more when the police doing the arresting are from the same country as the ones doing the surveillance.

nodata• 13 years ago

And this is a key point, a decision that many people said would never happen again: dividing the world into two groups of people is what started a few problems before.

flexie• 13 years ago

Absolutely. I remember how in 2001 when the US as the first country ever invoked article 5 of the NATO treaty, within hours all NATO members had followed through with support. And the minute of silence that was held all over Europe for the 9/11 victims. Then we joined them in two wars.

We bought their cell phones, their operating systems and productivity suites, their internet adds, hosting and email services and movies and music. We even let some of their largest corporations get away without paying taxes on the money they made in our countries.

We may not be citizens of their country but we are allies, not terrorists. When it comes to the bad things groups of people, such as governments, do to individuals, whether it's killing, torture, imprisonment with or without trial, surveillance or any other of the misdeeds that seems to have returned from the dark ages we deserve the same protection as American citizens.

sneak• 13 years ago

When it comes to the bad things groups of people, such as governments, do to individuals, whether it's killing, torture, imprisonment with or without trial, surveillance or any other of the misdeeds that seems to have returned from the dark ages we deserve the same protection as American citizens.

Despite the actions and statements of our government, most of us Americans feel the same way. (It's just that the shitty entitled xenophobes are just so damn loud sometimes...)

You'll note that in our declaration of independence, it states that the rights to life and liberty are the inalienable birthright of every man, endowed by his creator, before it says fuck-all about anyone's government.

softbuilder• 13 years ago

We bought their cell phones

To be fair, folks in the US bought a LOT of European cell phones first. :)

anvandare• 13 years ago

allies

No, we're vassals. The USA orders and we obey, whether it's supporting their military machine or handing over information, people, research, or economical advantages. It's a hegemony.

the misdeeds that seems to have returned from the dark ages

You've been fed propaganda. The crimes have always been there. The USA has always supported tyranny, cruelty, and crimes against humanity if it served its best interests (like every other country, I might add.)

we deserve the same protection as American citizens

If the government wants someone naked, chained, and tortured in some foreign place, it'll happen. No matter who it is. True? Maybe not (yet), but it's telling enough that it sounds plausible, no?

x3c• 13 years ago

Had to google what article 5 of NATO was:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Silhouette4• 13 years ago

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.

Almost nobody in the US, perhaps, but this whole mess isn't doing the US any favours at all with the international community, certainly not here in Europe.

I'd say there's a fair chance the cavalier attitude towards the rights of non-citizens so overtly displayed by leading US politicians and security people over the past few days could ultimately swing the entire public debate in a way the US administration really doesn't want it to go. Those statements get broadcast on TV internationally, too, and everyone in the room cringes when they hear them.

flyinRyan4• 13 years ago

Let's hope so. The sooner the US gets marginalized and put on the shelf internationally, the sooner the world will become a safer place to live.

konstruktor3• 13 years ago

This is something that already pissed me off when drone strikes were discussed. While not caring about foreigners is probably the most important reason, there is another one that actually makes sense, and which is why I give Americans a little bit of benefit of doubt: Given the strict protections of your constitution, it is much easier to fight the parts that concern citizens of the US. Edit: accidentally submitted after the first word, rest of post added.

einhverfr18• 13 years ago

Drone strikes are also different. They represent currently a sort of danger to the world I don't think people really appreciate because they allow an elite to control more firepower with fewer henchmen than is possible otherwise. Air strikes are nothing new but in the past you had to contend with the fact that enough people might disobey orders to force a change of plans. With drones, the number of people you rely on is far less.

I remember a story that on 9/11 orders were issued to shoot down any aircraft left in the sky and that fighter pilots refused to carry out the order. How would things be different if it was 8 specially trained anti-terrorist folks commanding largely autonomous drones?

kaichanvong• 13 years ago

Looking at some of the bigger selling newspapers in the UK, I don't think people get it or the writers believe people wouldn't get it. On the whole most people in the UK who are not technical appear to know pretty much nothing about it and do not understand why it might be bad for them.

The whole, "I have nothing to fear" point of view. It's the bigger picture they need to think about :(

flyinRyan4• 13 years ago

I would imagine the UK expected this was the case all along. I mean, you guys arrest people for tweets, after all.

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

It was the same with the drone strike debate. The whole buzz was about the fact that the US president now could order a drone strike on US citizens.

No discussion about non US citizens. It was just assumed that drone striking them was OK. Made me really feel weird as an European.

radd9er3• 13 years ago

It made me feel weird as an American.

easytiger• 13 years ago

When you enter america as a tourist you (used to) sign a document saying you wave all rights of personal freedom. Now they make you pay for it up front online every couple of years.

buro95• 13 years ago

The US legal system is only accessible by citizens of the USA.

It should be of no surprise then, that citizens of other countries have no ability to protect themselves from over-reaching laws and actions by the US government.

SagelyGuru• 13 years ago

'Foreigners' are customers too. They are expected to abide by the terms of service agreements (TOS) issued by these companies, which all include statements about protecting customers' data and privacy. As far as I can see, all these companies broke their contracts (their own TOS).

vbuterin• 13 years ago

And from a legal standpoint just because there's a law that happens to force you to break a contract does not usually absolve you from liability for doing so. Of course, many of these contracts may contain some kind of "you have no rights if the law says so" clause, in which case the companies would be in the clear.

valdiorn• 13 years ago

As a non american; Thank you for caring!

jeffasinger• 13 years ago

I think there's also a slightly different reaction to it, because most Americans like to feel like, at some level, the government works for citizens, and is ultimately responsible directly to them.

If the government is willing to spy directly on the people it should be serving, then it starts to feel like it's out of control.

alanning• 13 years ago

I believe this gets to the heart of why Americans are (and should be) disturbed about programs like PRISM. When the US spies on a foreign citizen, the full weight of that citizen's government is there to protect their interests.

When the US spies on US citizens, who do we have to turn to?

lkrubner• 13 years ago

The irony is that this issue (the universality of human rights) was the starting point of the dissent in the colonies in the 1760s that eventually lead to revolt against British rule in 1775. The people in the British colonies supported Parliament during the long revolutionary/counter-revolutionary period that lead up to the passage of the English Bill Of Rights in 1689, which everyone, in 1689, assumed applied to everyone under the rule of the crown. It was only the 1760s that Parliament adopted the attitude that the Bill Of Rights were privileges that only belonged to those who lived in Britain proper -- and the colonists were outraged that the rights they had assumed they had won 80 years earlier were now being denied to them. In 1774, when the government of Virginia asked Thomas Jefferson, to draw up a list of the grievances that the colonies had with Parliament, Jefferson referenced the long history of events that started under the Stuart Kings.

When the Founding Fathers eventually drew up a Bill Of Rights for the new nation, most of them wrote things that explicitly suggest that they felt the rights being granted were universal -- in particular, Benjamin Franklin was vehement on the subject, arguing that the Bill Of Rights extended to everyone, including the blacks who were being held in slavery (and when Congress met for the first time in 1789, Franklin pushed a bill to abolish all slavery).

downandout2• 13 years ago

While I actually hope that the predictions in this article come true, as people should not put their data at risk by allowing it to pass through the US at this point, I am pessimistic that anything will change. I was sure that seizure of overseas internet poker domains, on the basis that .com domains are controlled by an American organization, would have been enough to drastically reduce .com registrations. That didn't happen. People have a tendency not to care about things until it directly smacks them in the face, and then it's too late.

iframe• 13 years ago

Now I'm looking for a decentralized social network

AlexeiSadeski4• 13 years ago

A minor correction in terminology:

The US Constitution and case law makes no distinction between protections granted to US citizens and foreigners. All are treated equally under the law, and thusly "enjoy" the same "protections."

However, case law has determined that such protections are not granted outside of the US's borders. Thus, an American citizen and a foreigner have equal protection (again, in theory) when inside of US borders - and both are equally unprotected when outside of US borders (it's a bit more complex regarding the 'outside of US borders' part, but that's the general gist).

andyl• 13 years ago

So much of internet business rides on trust. Yes, this is gonna damage the US Internet industry.

If you're selling cloud-based services in overseas markets, your non-American competitors just got a big helping hand.

petercooper• 13 years ago

Chicken Little, is that you?

Sami_Lehtinen5• 13 years ago

Similar actions has been affecting other businesses earlier: "Due to this, Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera has, as of June 5, 2008, moved their Sonera (Finnish) e-mail servers out of Sweden, as Finnish law requires communication to be confidential. They have also transferred Swedish customers from Finnish to Swedish servers, to prevent Sweden-to-Sweden e-mail from crossing the border."

kjeldsendk• 13 years ago

It's safe to say that if i find a real alternative to Google Apps i will be moving a few hundred people away from Google Apps. Right now we just have to live with the 1984 feeling.

Yuioup• 13 years ago

How much of it was Bush rather than Obama?

mtgx• 13 years ago

This is the Europeans' "big break", and they need to take advantage of it. Hopefully they won't resolve around UK, because it's probably just as bad at this. Maybe Germany can be the center of innovation in Europe. At least they have some pretty strong laws and strict judges, and citizens can even create their own laws and referendums.

taktix• 13 years ago

Nowhere in the world can you escape from US omniscient powers nowadays, and I can't help think this may be the prophesied New World Order (or if you're a Christian, the "Great Abominable Church").

It's imperialism via information, and US corporations are the foot soldiers.

D9u• 13 years ago

There went that fabled "moral high ground," right out the window.

This government wants to keep increasingly more secrets from its populace, while simultaneously decreasing our rights to secrecy.

More of the double standard which widens the gap between "We the People" and the ruling classes.

kriro• 13 years ago

Here's two high level pitches someone should go and try to validate:

"Like Google with strong data protection."

"Like Facebook with strong data protection."

Feel free to send me some of your billions later.

I think there's some outrage now but by and large most citizens don't really care as long as there's some justification they can buy (ZOMG gotta protect us against those terrorists). Yes it's a sad state of affairs but that's what it is.

If I'm wrong on that the US has just created a pretty sweet incentive for European/Other entrepreneurs to grab a good chunk of the silicon valley business.

caycep• 13 years ago

Not sure about Obama, but maybe Snowden did just for the timing and the linking in the public mind with these companies. For those who've been keeping track of this, this isn't all that entirely new - I mean articles going back over the past few decades in the Washington Post, at least 3 NYT bestsellers by James Bamford, what more do you really need in terms of "revelations"? My general gist of it was that the NSA probably was scooping packets somehow, and if they really wanted to get you, they could.

Somehow, this time, the story got traction. I agree w/ the general consensus that it's about damn time. The Mil Industrial Complex will keep rolling on w/ "Top Secret-creep" and "Surveilance-creep" until a proper re-evaluation of the Church reforms and the Patriot act and other contributory/relevant legislation for this day and age is conducted, and enforced.

I am hoping the earlier "All wars must end" speech on the part of Obama is hinting at a step in this direction.

Of note, it was probably worse pre-internet, when the NSA could just scoop radio signals out of the air...networked communications made it much harder for them - at least temporarily.

Also with SIGINT, the NSA is joined at the hip by the UK, Canada, AUS and NZ...the NSA technically could avoid spying domestically by sending intel requests to their counterpart agencies...

richardw• 13 years ago

I've been wondering about this. The U.S. will be considered the anti-Switzerland with respect to our privacy. If you want your data safe, don't store it in the U.S.

Next question: how are Google etc treating my data when my own government wants to know what I say about them? Do they also bend over backwards to set up portals for different levels of ally, or are foreign citizens safer from their own governments than US citizens are from theirs?

foxylad• 13 years ago

"destroy" is hyperbole, but it's certainly going to have a chilling effect. We can't ignore the elephant in the room any longer - our utopian global human internet is actually just a US government controlled plaything.

My company provides a service to the government sector in Australia, hosted on Google's Appengine. We've been negotiating a blanket deal with a government department, and I can see that we're going to have to answer some very hard questions about the security of their data after this. Winning this deal would make a ten-fold increase in hosting costs irrelevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they even offered to pay us more to host in Australia just for their peace of mind.

Most of us learn as kids how asymmetrical trust is, and how once you're caught lying no-one believes your apologies or promises to mend your ways. Before PRISM, it was only the cynics muttering about how the US Government saw everything we did. Post PRISM, most non-US companies (and probably many US companies too) will be looking for neutral alternatives to US services.

And Richard Stallman... proved right yet again!

konstruktor3• 13 years ago

While consumers may be too lazy to care, cloud providers will lose a lot of business. You can bet that every trade magazine outside the US will have articles discussing if it is even legal to store data with US providers given the particular country's regulation and the information we have.

1morepassword2• 13 years ago

That's already been a common discussion for many years. The business world outside the US is very much aware of the problem.

What we're likely to see now is article discussing how to get out of the US cloud, because it has now shifted from a potential legal issue to a commercial selling point.

Even clients with "nothing to hide" will start asking questions about where the data is stored. Not so much because they're worried about the US looking at their data, but because they want to know how well we as their service provider take care of their data.

1morepassword2• 13 years ago

The damage was already done well before that. Individuals may not care that much (so Facebook is relatively safe), but businesses and governments have already been well aware that storing their data in US-run services is a bad idea, and in many ways not even legal because of existing privacy and security related regulations.

If you for instance store sensitive medical data, you can't do that somewhere where the US government may get access to it whenever they want (warrant or not btw, unless that warrant is server to you and not your service American provider).

Many of us are looking at ways of backing out or staying out of US services for the potential legal complications alone. This may accelerate things, but to most it was already clear: if you have any kind of liability concerning the data you store and process, you can't use American online services.

The question "does your product use American services?" will be asked with increasing frequency. Also, having "no" as an answer is a good selling point in many markets.

SideburnsOfDoom• 13 years ago

"American companies have overwhelmingly dominated it. They have done so with astonishing innovation and technical achievement. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype..."

Skype was in no sense an American company until it was sold, first to eBay and then to MS

Smrchy• 13 years ago

I live i Germany. And whenever we try to sell cloud-based services to our customers there is this group of people that are not comfortable with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. They like to keep data in their own racks on their own servers. The standard reply is to call it FUD and talk about all the advantages the cloud has.

It will be a lot harder to win an argument against them now that everybody knows that data which is stored in the U.S. is free bait for the NSA to play with. It's no longer fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's just fear now.

locusm3• 13 years ago

Whats interesting here in Australia is that mainstream press are largely ignoring this story. The number one story on news.com.au right now is "How the fabulously rich kids travel" - cant wait to read that! The Ed Snowden story is way down the page.

DominikR• 13 years ago

It is sad for me to see the course that the US and the European governments have taken in the recent years.

My company (a small european provider of mobile telephony and chat) has to store all traffic that is going over our service during the last six months for the government, which may request that data. They didn't yet try to get that data in bulk, but I am pretty sure that we will see that happen in the near future. And there will be nothing that we can do about it as a small company if we want to stay in business and out of prison.

I believe that at some point this will harm IT business, which hopefully will also cause the government to rethink their strategy, but I am afraid of how far they will have to go before they come to this realization.

In 1998 (as a 17 year old boy) I was able to board a plane in London to Vienna without passport. (because I've lost it during my trip) Today I have to give fingerprints and other biometric data like a criminal just to get a new passport. Tomorrow maybe it will be a standard procedure that robots do a body cavity search on me before boarding a plane.

It is funny that I, as a tech enthusiast, am hoping that I wont see the kind of progress in robotics during my lifespan, that enables them to do anal probing at scale in airports.

nacho2sweet• 13 years ago

I worked at a University in Canada, and we had a no USA hosted services policy from day one of that Patriot Act. Not everyone knew about it or followed it but if an IT department was involved in development we had to enforce it. It was really frustrating for me a lot of times because I couldn't design new useful solutions or suggest products like SurveyMonkey for example that would save everyone huge amounts of time.

This is totally the kind of thing that is going to happen to a lot of businesses now that less technical people that are higher up are aware of these issues. They are going to get a little fearful and mandate certain services are a no go.

Vivtek• 13 years ago

No, because none of these laws have been enacted in the Obama administration.

And yes, because Candidate Obama said he was going to fix things, then discovered other priorities once in office.

Fuxy• 13 years ago

I doubt many people will leave American companies real soon there are just not many good alternatives at the moment but given a choice between an American company and say one in a more privacy oriented country that advertises its position properly people may think twice.

Nobody seems to mention that the intelligence agencies of the world deal with information and their not shy of selling it. Say for instance a revolution is brewing over Facebook in a country the US would like to keep as is how likely is it that the CIA would provide intelligence to that country to stop the revolution?

Facebook may be a tool for revolution but it can be a tool to stop revolution as well and the US government gets to decide which one will it be.

I'd rather they stay out of it and the only way to do that is to not use US services.

bonchibuji• 13 years ago

Baidu instead of Google

Renren instead of Facebook

Youku/Todou instead of Youtube

Weibo instead of Twitter

----------------------------------

Yandex instead of Google

VK instead of Facebook

Only Beijing and Moscow saw this coming!

Mordor• 13 years ago

Well, it's probably illegal for the US to sell its products in the EU. Certainly it's game over for the cloud industry.

Cardeck12• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who sees a tech-war coming in the next 10 years?I always suspected that as new tech arises the chances of seeing a war rises too.

Cardeck12• 13 years ago

This is child's play compared to the information they will gather from Google Glasses...Imagine what they could do with that...

timedoctor• 13 years ago

It makes a mockery of the concept of the US being the bastion of freedom and being an example to other countries.

ansimionescu• 13 years ago

This might answer the question in the title:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

ubernostrum• 13 years ago

This is one of the most formulaic, most predictable comments on HN. It adds nothing to the discussion, offers no insight into the topic, and exists only as a cheap way to score magical internet points.

Please do not post such comments again.

blahbl4hblah• 13 years ago

Yeah, it was Obama. He did it by himself. He just turned his evil black man powers on the internet industry and just blacked it all up. He did this because he is the entire federal government.

Jesus.

xradionut• 13 years ago

Most of the comments are concerning politics and very little are concern the economics of smaller companies and individuals rejecting services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

(Microsoft's TechEd had a big push towards Azure this last week. Their timing sucks... Sorry about their bad luck...)

kailuowang• 13 years ago

Was the industry just destroyed? That shouldn't be too hard a question to answer. A good indication is the stock market - so far all major U.S. Internet companies' stocks show no signs of collapsing (prices increased since the leak). If you think the market is wrong, it's good opportunity for you to cash in.

It's also a good indication that the rulling class is not much concerned about this leak of PRISM at all.

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

It is now easy for any country to ban US based technologies in order to jump start their own tech industry.

This is the beginning of the end of the US tech industry in general.

msaint• 13 years ago

No.

asldkfj234• 13 years ago

are non us people going to stop using microsoft windows, intel cpus, vmware... ? Wouldn't it make more sense for the nsa to bug these things ?

Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

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