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American security laws could be used to override European privacy rules if data is held on international cloud servers, letting US agencies freely rifle through anything submitted to ‘The Cloud’. Which is just about everything nowadays.
The findings are published in a paper from the Institute for Information Law over in the University of Amsterdam, which was put together to see if the move to the cloud changed the default settings of the Patriot Act, which was put in place in 2001, back when the primitive people of the time stored data locally on discs, USB sticks and in the form of crude physical paper copies known as “print-outs.”
Axel Arnbak, one of the researchers responsible for the paper, said: “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments (FISA) Act makes it easy for US authorities to circumvent local government institutions and mandate direct and easy access to cloud data belonging to non-Americans living outside the US, with little or no transparency obligations for such practices — not even the number of actual requests.”
Which seems to imply that if your cloud hosting company is based in the US, it’s subject to US laws, and there’s nothing you can do about it if Barack Obama decides he needs to see a copy of your MP3 collection or Google Play order history. [SSRN via CBS News]
Image credit: Cloud city from Shutterstock
This makes sense (in legal terms). You give permission for the company to store the information (or a copy of it) and they are subject to US law that says the government can go through any of the records they hold, this is not, in any way, a new situation.
Yes the logic of it makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the law itself. Well at least not unless you like living in 1984 that is.
The right of Governments to spy on some of it’s citizens for the safety of other citizens may be controversial, but until the human race as a whole grows up, it will be needed. Obviously such law requires balances and oversight, but abuse of the law is not the fault of the law or it’s intended purpose.
The abuse of the law is inevitable. It is set up in a way that stops democracy and controls decent.
‘Those are a willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both. ‘
I can tell you that I would rather have my family, my children and my friends be at a slight risk of something bad happening to them (murder, violent attack etc.) than having the population controlled by a central corrupt government.
Your argument is the equivalent of saying ‘you can give a baby a chopping knife since the intended purpose of the chopping knife is not to hurt babes.’
Please don’t confuse me with a supporter of this, my original point was just that this is neither strange nor new. I do not believe that abuse of the law is “inevitable” but it does need to be guarded against. I also assume you mean dissent rather than decent since nothing is controlling the human race’s decent.
Okay, while it is a scary idea and anyone using cloud computing for sensitive information and the trend for this information to be viewed by governments in scary, the Patriot act has long been in place with powers like this and a great many other countries operate similar policies (similar counter-terrorism laws exist in places like the UK and Canada as well). It is common sense that if you have sensitive data that you encrypt it with your own encryption keys, whether you store it in the cloud or on premises. While cloud computing will be of concern to a great many, other US based organizations that store customer data are the ones to be concerned for. Amazon for example has lots of data that are of a fairly intimate nature. God forbid the US government decides to monitor everyone that buys a certain book…