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Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

Which is just wildly backwards. It is the same mindset of the cyberpunk "privacy advocates" of the early 2000s, move your stuff to Sealand or Switzerland.

The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.

Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.

Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.

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>The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.

there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.

the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.

secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.

I wish I believed that they have to go to the FISA court for much of anything any more. Instead they go to Palantir and the like which simply buy the data and aggregate it. Very similar to the process of money laundering. And for the data that can't be bought there's the five eyes work around.

Huh? They buy the data themselves from data brokers, no need to go through a middleman.

As an advocate (and practitioner) of European digital sovereignty, let me tell you, at least from my perspective, it has absolutely nothing to do with fear of US intelligence agencies spying on us, and everything to do with the catastrophic consequences of an unreliable and unstable American government pulling the plug on our vital infrastructure, or at least the very least weaponizing our dependency on American companies.

I live in Denmark, a country whose primary threat at the moment is the USA, and the thought of Donald Trump effectively having a kill-switch to our highly digitalized society is absolutely frightening. Reducing our dependence on American tech means that we are less vulnerable to a hostile power using it to extort us out of our territory. We cannot remove the threat entirely, but we can make the pain less extreme.

Other EU countries are also seeing things this way, that the US no longer has a stable government and is no longer a friendly country. Who cares about American spying when the real threat is your country being turned off?

As a Canadian who has been listening to the "51st state" wordvomit coming out of US administration your comment is very apt.

For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment. There's countless US articles talking about US/Canada relations as if it is a trade dispute and that they think Canadians are eager to re-unite and go back to the way things were without ever addressing the threats to our sovereignty. Then you have comments like the parent to your post who is....wildly off the mark thinking that in a point of contention we'd prefer to keep our data on US controlled systems because their government would need to follow their own legal processes to acquire data of a foreign/hostile state??????

The parent to their post was saying your risk assessment of which country should host is incorrect, given who you believe to be your biggest threat, i.e. your preferences are not aligned with reducing your risk.

For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment.

Lets help them via visualisation: from rank 30 to 48 in just one year

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-b...

This becomes even more striking if you look at who they surveyed:

> They asked citizens across the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.)

They're not even asking those from the half of the world that has been bombed or coup d'etated by the US in the last half century. They're asking those who should on paper dislike the US the least.

People from those countries ranking the US below India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey is quite something. Israel coming in at 55th out of 60, below Saudi Arabia, is also fantastic proof of how incredibly unrepresentative these "representative democracies" are of their populace. The US and Germany are even 2 of the 7 surveyed countries! Without them I wouldn't be surprised if they came in last, under Iran and China.

For some reason I cannot grasp Canadians think the US citizens think about them at all. We may as well not have a northern neighbor, all that most of us think exist between Michigan and Alaska is snowy wilderness.

Can you sponsor GrapheneOS or fork Android similarly please? Maybe HMD should be working with GrapheneOS.

The fear is not "NSA is snooping on our customer data", it's "Trump has a beef with our premiere minister/president, and Jeff Bezos accepted Trumps request to turn off AWS from them" that's the fear.

We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.

Compelling Microsoft to turn off your Office 365 at least requires Microsoft to be complicit. Sovereign infrastructure didn't protect Venezuela or Iran.

> Sovereign infrastructure didn't protect Venezuela or Iran.

Imagine if the control plane of the Shahed drones were hosted on AWS.

What are you even talking about?

Karım Kahn at the International Criminal Court would like a word about that.

So you’re scared of losing AWS? What about the ability to have global IP space? That’s still firmly in US control.

Businesses are scared to lose access to data hosted at US entities, because this recently happened, so they have good reason to fear something like that.

AFAIK, the US has never done that with IP space, but if we did see evidence of that, then you'd see similar worries about that for sure. But I think most of us see it as pretty implausible to happen, since the consequences of such move would be huge, and would probably end the internet as we know it today.

The US won't want to do that because China will have an alternative ready within a day and every China-friendly country will migrate to it. Now US leadership is demented, luckily they've never heard of IPs and I really don't believe it would happen. I think the likelihood of them starting WW3 is more likely than using IPs for power games.

If you rely on services provided by the US, you are one signature away from the current president forbidding US companies to provide service to you. This could be extremely disruptive.

> Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data.

You are equating illegal behavior with legal behavior. We do what we can to avoid the legal ways the US government can access our data.

I think their point is that that behaviour is legal from a US perspective, when the target of a US government investigation is outside the US.

So probably makes sense to host on EU headquartered companies

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