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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

I have always ridiculed those big European programs aimed at removing or limit the presence of google from Europeans citizens everyday life, but somehow, even if the European administrations can't manage software programs, their premises were right all along. Some friends were looking for providers outside of the Patriot Act because their customers would not accept US spying on their data, I was telling them I didn't really care, I was wrong. We might have to cut some links across the pound because our "ally" is turning less and less rational and he's massively weaponized, and take a sane route for ourselves (which is a big fight on its own).

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So if the theory holds true that things need to get worse before they get better, this could be good news in that it could be the motivating event in the global market for truly private cloud services.

Perhaps some European startup has a solution to our US based privacy problem that we could all migrate to for our cloud services.

As much as the US should be blamed for Prism etc., it should not be ignored that very similar programs exist in Europa as well – often in direct cooperation with the US. There might be a privacy advantage in Europe on paper but not much of that remains in daily life and business reality, it is mostly 'cover your ass' in the end.

They don't share everything, for example when they spy on a foreign company in advance for a big RFE, they won't share. But they are most likely to share real threats, because they are being judged on what they share. Then you have the game of powers, like when Europe had to surrender plane passengers personal data. Being foreigner's data, they are perfectly game for every spilling or abuse since only US citizens are a political issue, and there is mostly no way to get the US Government accountable for any international treaty.

Exactly which government can you hold to international treaties ?

Let's take a very obvious and blatant example. The government of Saudi Arabia signed the declaration of human rights, the FIRST article of which guarantees individual freedom of religion. Yet we all know they don't allow that, and they regularly execute ex-muslims for converting to Christianity, for being gay, and for a dozen other things. There's thousands of documented cases.

As if this is not bad enough, the government officials of Saudi Arabia regularly get caught torturing people they plucked off the street, apparently for fun. One of their allies, a UAE official, got caught on tape (or should we say, made a tape of him having his fun, then someone "leaked" it) [1]. This is legal (in sharia the government has the right to kill, torture and ... anyone they want).

I would say this is a far more blatant and dishonest practice than the ones you're alleging to. Yes the US spies, big whoop. They don't publicly behead people for things they signed a treaty they would not consider a crime ... And yet nobody seems to care. Yet one thing seems blatantly obvious : when it comes to human rights, the US ... is not the problem.

The truth is that outside of some of Western Europe and the US, most governments consider international treaties little more than a weapon to be used against their enemies because of the public attention they can garner using them. The most blatant violators, from Saudi Arabia to China, accuse everyone, from the US to Luxembourg, of violating international agreements of torture. Nobody should take this serious, but of course a lot of people do.

So let me know how these international treaties are supposed to work. I would love to hear how you'll get freedom of conviction, religion, politics and sexual orientation respected in the ~2/3rds of our planet that has signed an international treaty not to consider it a crime, yet kill people for it. China, just about every muslim country, Russia, ... (2/3rds, because China, India and Indonesia together form a comfortable 60% of the world, and none of them respects even basic freedom of religion. Only India can be said to give it a half-hearted attempt)

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHgaMqTzWaE

Europe spies on its citizens in other ways. For example, with CCTV all over Britain. Heaven forbid a company should provide its opt-in users with a marginal service, and spy on them for a little bit of profit.

How does the quote go? "Don't spy. Government hates competition"

EDIT: I should also point out that if yes, google data goes to the US gov't (which I believe in a qualified manner) one could chalk up the european shutdowns of google to basically just be jealous of the US's access to that data.

CCTV is in a public place. No European person would expect that their private Skype calls, GMails and Dropbox files are being stored by the NSA. Clearly the US government knows the logging is unfair as it does not include its own citizens [1]

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/07/transcript-what-oba...

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