European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM

Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by mbesto on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @01:07PM (#5863152)

It'll be interesting to see what happens to those global (US-based) cloud providers whose business strategy of poor profit margins in exchange for reduced costs of sale fair after this PR catastrophe. When it comes to the economics of this, the US is going to lose a huge amount of business due to this and potentially could in theory cause several businesses to go bankrupt. Since, government's are naturally fiscally motivated, I suspect the real way for Americans to complain is "with their wallets". In other words there is definitely an argument to be had for "We can't compete in the world's technology game because they don't trust our security. We can no longer innovate because of the government's haphazardness. Fix this US government." At least then when another terrorist attack happens in the US, the government can say "Well, you wanted your economics, so we gave it to you, but now you lack security. Pick one or the other."

This is going to be great for EU-based providers. They've been struggling for awhile to compete with Amazon, Rackspace, etc. I'd bet my money today on private, country-based cloud providers in EU. It will be nearly impossible for the US to dig itself out of this one.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by res0nat0r on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @02:12PM (#5863642)

I used to work for AWS and currently work for another large cloud computing company, and the words NSA and PRISM haven't been mentioned once in any of our companywide meetings this week.

I think the HN echo chamber is hyping this up more than the rest of the real corporate world. Large companies who want to move to the cloud already know the risks/rewards of hosting their data via offsite 3rd party companies. They aren't worried about some threat that the NSA is sucking up all their data, they are concerned about people breaking into their instances and stealing their customer data.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by freehunter on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @02:34PM (#5863805)

I work in information security for a large international corporation, and I can add another anecdote to back up yours. We've discussed the news informally as a curiosity, but there's no business drive to really do anything about it. We're not trying to hide our business operations from the government, we're trying to hide them from our competitors. You're absolutely correct that businesses care about security from civilians more than security from governments.

With that, the push won't happen unless our customers start demanding our cloud-based solutions are free from government snooping. In my employer's industry, I doubt that would happen. However, we have gained compliance with many industry standards that we don't necessarily need to be complaint with just because our customers demanded it. It's not the big businesses that will be demanding a change, it's the customers of those businesses. If enough customers care, things will change. If the customers don't care, then nothing will be done.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by danmaz74 on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @03:12PM (#5864048)

Well, if you were a large enough non-US company, and you had large US competitors - especially defense contractors - you would think differently. You would think about Echelon and industrial espionage. But I expect those kinds of companies not using foreign IT services already.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by freehunter on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @03:49PM (#5864281)

That's a fair point. I don't work in the defense industry so that didn't cross my mind. I suspect you're correct with all three sentences.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by kalms on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @03:01PM (#5863978)

Well, I work at a company that leverages cloud technology, and it's been the topic on more than a few occasions.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by killerpopiller on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @02:38PM (#5863827)

..it already is. E.g. german companies with a data protection comissioners/officers usually don't store data outside EU coutries, since the data protection level is considered to be to low.

§4b Abs.2 S.2 Bundesdatenschutzgesetz prohibits conveyance of personal data outside EU borders if the interest of persons concerned outweighs it (mostly it does).

This PRISM-surveillance substantiates those concerns.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by nostromo on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @02:52PM (#5863912)

My startup has faced this issue -- but it's easily solved using American cloud providers (for example: AWS Ireland).

But, frankly, I don't know how Amazon would respond if they received a national security letter asking for data hosted by Amazon in Ireland.

It'd be nice to see a country take a very strong stand on data privacy. They could be to hosting servers what Switzerland is to hosting money.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by killerpopiller on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @03:11PM (#5864042)

There are MLA, mutual legal assistance, which needs certain proof, and aim usually for foreign companies with data of interest to the US.

Servers from companies with a US-based headquarter belong to our new overlord, the US gov. and can be owned with a FISA-warrant (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – FISA 1978/2008) garnished with a National Security Letter (NSL).

We know that procedures from Microsoft U.K. head: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patri...

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by DuskStar on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @03:20PM (#5864111)

If Amazon does their accounting the same way as Google/Facebook, then Amazon Ireland is likely their international HQ, and technically a different company than Amazon US. (For tax reasons; Ireland has a much lower corporate tax rate than the US)

And so I would really expect them to follow Irish, not US, law.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by 7952 on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @04:37PM (#5864551)

For a European what actually is the advantage in using US AWS instead of Ireland? If you are serving the EU why would you add the additional latency?

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by MisterWebz on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @01:58PM (#5863532)

It seems the EU has better privacy laws, but it would be foolish to think that there isn't any surveillance and spying being done here.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by jsonne on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @02:22PM (#5863730)

They don't in the slightest. Check out Sweden's FRA laws. They're even more invasive than PRISM.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by MisterWebz on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @02:56PM (#5863945)

In school I've been taught that companies (and government entities?) are not allowed to keep your private information stored unless they have a valid reason for keeping it, and if they do, then you're allowed to know what they're storing and have the right to ask them to delete the data.

I remember reading an article that was posted here on HN about someone demanding Facebook to reveal the personal information they were storing of him, because IIRC, one of Facebook's servers is located in Europe, so they had to abide by EU's privacy laws. He eventually got a CD containing his personal info. It contained very limited data and not as much as I believe that they would have collected, but it shows that companies in Europe have to follow these laws.

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Re:European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM by jsonne on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @03:26PM (#5864153)

I guess I suppose that by privacy laws you meant something different than simply the ability to be given the information collected about you. I was also coming at it from a governmental aspect versus private as well.

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