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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

I believe that if this proposal passed, it would merely create "safe havens" for Internet hosting in countries that are not part of this partnership, just as there are currently tax havens in countries that do not respect taxation laws of other countries. This is already the case for operators of websites that infringe on copyright law, they simply choose to host from any of the countries that do not respect international copyright agreements.

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Ah, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stepehson updated for the internet age. Worth reading if you havent.

Updated nothing, that sounds like Cryptonomicon's fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta.

Thank you for the pointer toward what seems like an excellent read! Just ordered it on Amazon.

All his stuff is great. If you like it, check the baroque cycle too

Just as a counterpoint: while I like his stuff in general, I disliked the baroque cycle (but still read the whole thing).

My recommendation: Anathem.

If anyone should ask I will explain my opinion on the baroque cycle.

The Vault!

Well, that's the stopgap, for sure.

But recall that the US took down Liberty Reserve in Costa Rica, and that Russia does sometimes cooperate with the US on cybercrime.

Long term, what we need are distributed safe havens that can't be localized or taken down.

And with this kind of deal being done with the UK first, there's even more of a reason for tech companies to leave the UK (after Brexit, and soon the passage of the IPBill, which will also make it possible for the UK government to "demand decryption", among other things).

Are you saying e.g. Facebook would move their management and core development team to like Guatemala or something because of this?

Why would they have to do that? They would just have to keep the data in a country that won't be part this new legal framework.

As the article says, these plans were announced after Microsoft won a court case to prevent the US government from searching Microsoft's servers located overseas. The government's solution to this is to honor foreign warrants to search US servers, so that foreign governments will reciprocally honor US warrants to search foreign servers. This will enable the US government to get data from Microsoft's servers if they are located in any country which is part of this agreement.

So, just find a country that isn't part of this agreement, and is not likely to become part of it, and keep the data there. Amazon could open a few AWS datacenters in such countries and make a lot of money.

And then Panama Leaks happen.

We live in a new age. With Panama leaks we have whistle blowers who haven't got stuck in jail or in exile.

People and corps can't play the old games.

What makes you think there would need to be any secrecy involved in offshoring data?

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