As Snowden said, good encryption is a part defense against this. VeraCrypt http://veracrypt.org works nicely with DropBox, while SyncDocs https://syncdocs.com encrypts Google Drive.
Richelieu would have had a ridiculously easier time if he could select any six lines from everything an honest man had ever written. Using encryption to make this harder could be wise.
Big, purely money driven cooperations will follow the path of the least resistance so it's no surprise that they automate LE requests away in the long run. As most of the "internet giants" essentially make money by spying on their users they have the basic infrastructure in place already.
[1] 'We Kill people based on metadata' some former CIA/NSA director once admitted.
Faced with the extended delays under the MLAT process, some countries are
now asserting that their laws apply to companies and individuals outside of
their borders. Countries asserting extraterritorial authority potentially
put companies in an untenable situation where we risk violating either the
law of the requesting country or the law of the country where we are
headquartered.
[...]
We are also seeing various proposals to require companies to store data
within local borders as a means to gain easier access.
1 - Google doesn't want to be in the middle of Country X and the US where the laws conflict;
2 - More worryingly, countries are requiring data be kept within their borders and hence subject to their laws. This complicates google's business of monetizing people's data.
which is great until it's not slow and there is no due process. I think the key motivation may be:
> Faced with the extended delays under the MLAT process, some countries are now asserting that their laws apply to companies and individuals outside of their borders. Countries asserting extraterritorial authority potentially put companies in an untenable situation where we risk violating either the law of the requesting country or the law of the country where we are headquartered.
which is presumably a reference to this case: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/microsoft-wins-c...
They were reminded that the Stored Communications Act does not apply outside of the US, but according to the OP the Second Circuit said Congress could easily change that.
If Congress started making moves in that direction it would make sense to get out in front of it with some kind of proposal, because AFAIK there's no constitutional basis for those protections.
I think some people are just naturally authoritarian. Unfortunately they also seem to be most likely to get into positions of power.
It's pretty fucking lousy if you're in jail on remand and haven't been convicted of a crime yet.
Have you considered the position of the victim?
Consider some instance of cybercrime, for example: perpetrators defrauding four companies of €86m [1]. Are LEO supposed to roll over and give up on the case, just because the perpetrators reside in some other country?
[1] Source is in German, sorry. http://derstandard.at/2000059612885/Cyberattacken-Bisher-86-...
Does that make tech employment in general the research arm of the ruling class trying to take away whatever privacy we have left?
The current system is slow and inefficient, and that is wonderful. Think about it. Police could always legally follow you - it only became a problem for privacy when CCTV and hidden GPS trackers made it easy to "follow" everyone at once, cheaply and efficiently. Much like password hashing algorithms, some systems only work well if they are kept slow and inefficient on purpose, to ratelimit their use. This causes each use to be reviewed and considered carefully. I feel like turning over user data to anyone should be one of these processes.
Let them get warrants signed in triplicate, convince ten judges, file thousands of pages of papers, find out they lack jurisdiction, convince more judges, etc... Only then is there a chance that they will not go on a fishing expedition for everyone's data all at once.
Always remember these words of Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." You may be an honest man (/woman/child/etc), but your government is always on its way to becoming Richelieu