Germany is a better bet. While they are no doubt tapping lines, Germany and the EU have made no moves to actually perform hostile interventions into data-centers or private servers. This means that encryption is still a very viable security measure for protecting your data in the EU. The EU simply has a far better track record with privacy related issues.
It's not about perfect security, it's about getting the best security you can hope for - and that means moving away from anything USA hosted.
And Germany has also laws which force every mail provider to install an access point to the German authorities and intelligence agencies. I am not sure if also a generic saas platform would have to do it, but it is quite possible.
Better pick Switzerland or Island.
Thanks for the heads up - as I said in the OP, it really is a difficult task. Those kind of laws are exactly what need to be avoided when choosing a country to host in. I don't believe that this kind of thing can be carried out in absolute silence though, so if a country is actively modifying and silencing hosts it's fairly likely that word of it will leak somewhere.
If I get a chance, I might try to put together a red/orange/green overview of known laws and practices in different countries that would affect hosting services there. Unless someone is already working on that and needs a hand?
It's up on github, so hopefully everyone can submit pull requests with data and we can crowd source ourselves a very informative map.
https://github.com/Ryan-ZA/hosting_safety_map
EDIT: I also submitted a link to it on HN. Hopefully interested people will see it and can help out with data.
We have a great privacy commissioner ( http://www.priv.gc.ca/index_e.asp ) but the office holds no power so far as I can see, and the Canadian government has a pretty solid track record of being obsequiously cooperative with u.s. interests
Cooperative with U.S. interests is generally assumed by almost any country - this map is more about the (hopeful) safety of your servers in data centers in different countries.
The short-term answer is to encrypt everything users have to store, and don't handle their keys, but it's a stop-gap: the only real answer is political and that's where things have to be fixed for good.
How that actually manifests itself, depends on how desperate people become to retain some sovereignty over their livelihoods… which begs the question, where are we now and who could provide the resources/environment to foster the type of change that is needed?
Users can not and will not securely manage key material.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/german-police-sei...
But in regards to cryptography and chances for legally fighting against such orders it could be better. At least on paper. The most likely outcome if lavabit would be hosted in germany would be a police raid that would take all servers for investigation with them. This happenend e.g. for poeple running Tor exit nodes.
If you're in the US it seems kinda pointless to try to move to overseas hosting; the NSA will probably just focus on the client side.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/bild-908609-515222...
It is quite possbible that, come September, some of the government parties might lose a few percentage points due to the citizens being annoyed about the erosion of the rule of law. We'll see.
The culture that brought us the SS and the Stasi.
Current German culture is equivalent to German culture under the Third Reich? Really?
Is current American culture equivalent to early-through-mid 19th century American culture? Should we discount everything the USA does because you once kept/traded/abused black people as property? Then continued to legislate such thinking via Jim Crow well into the 20th century?
Now that I look, I notice your post history is littered with anti-German racism rooted in complete historical ignorance. I'm wondering what your angle is.
There are very strong open source, transparency and anti surveillance movements in Germany. Stasi is the entire reason WHY we have strong privacy laws here.
How does one do that?
Well, I don't know if this is still done today, but when I was in 7th or 8th grade, they (school) drove us, by the busload, to visit a concentration camp.
We were shown the lampshades and wallets made of human skin. The place to stand where inmates would be executed during what they thought were medical examinations. And so on and so on.
It is quite possible that the next "Western" genocide will happen somewhere in Europe. But as somebody who has grown up here, I can assure you it won't be in Germany.
I just wish that history was thaught like this everywhere.
But the tolerant and open minded strain is pretty dominant. Germany is 9% foreigners. Frankfurt is like 30%
The culture that brought us the SS and the Stasi.
I don't. You just disqualified yourself from any meaningful discussion, ever.
My wife treated people with mental issues for some time and I have the utmost respect for people that can handle this stuff.
You, instead, are without protection. You post stuff like this and shout out to the world that you have no clue, that you have no idea what your are talking about, what the topic of this thread is and .. just show that HN really should provide a feature to ignore other people.
Please - go away. You didn't contribute and you're a sad, sad idiot.