Swedes say no to Google Apps for government use | Hacker News Reader

Swedes say no to Google Apps for government use

gigaom.com

108 pointsrahoulb24 comments

The last sentence in the article, "shows the need for more infrastructure catering to the needs of smaller populations — say, for the European Union" reminds me of a common US-centric misconception. Almost 500 million people live in the European Union, 740 in Europe including non-EU states, vs 314 in the US. A loss of trust in US-centric infrastructure could be an opportunity for providers catering to the needs of larger populations.

Some statistical links for those interested... according to the US gov't census the US has 316,470,920 (http://www.census.gov/popclock/) and counting. And according to Eurostat sources (http://europa.eu/about-eu/facts-figures/living/) the EU is running at 503,678,862.

I would think that means a subset of the billions served by globally reaching services.

Except the policy discussion takes place in the country scale not the territory scale.

We are (in most of the world) in a very unbalanced situation. Most of the state of the art technology is run by US companies. Thus the whole world (actually, those using services provided by those companies - i.e. nearly everybody) is being spied. US citizens and companies are also being spied, but here comes the unbalance:

The US government can use that information for bad or good purposes. This applies to information about US citizens and other citizens. It is easy to see why the US government would use that information for good purposes (like say, prevent a terror attack) for US citizens. (proably bad things will happen to US citizens too, like imprisonments for political reasons)

But it is very difficult to see why the US would do anything good for foreign individuals / corporations (unless we accept that the US is the world government, and has the interest of all of us in its heart, which is ludicrous).

So here we are: a government taking advantage of the technology developed by (mostly, but not only) US companies, to further a political agenda.

I expect global boycott of US based cloud providers. It does not make sense anymore. This is a trust which can not regained, since we have seen the tactics involve flat lying - even legislation to force companies to lie.

You are right, but the newly revealed indices suggests that your personal data are not collected primarily from the cloud providers after they arrived to the destination (like the spy agency would enter the Gmail repository through a backdoor and vacuum out all the data), rather, the whole (or most of) Internet traffic is monitored on the main routers and everything collected. Only thing which is not yet clear (at least to my knowledge), how much is this being done outside of U.S.

From this perspective, boycotting US based cloud providers is probably a reasonable thing to do, but it is not clear if this will results in less of your personal data being collected, if you just switch the provider. For example, I noticed it is now popular to switch from Gmail to other providers like fastmail.fm - I'm really not sure if this would be helpful at all.

Sure, but:

a) nobody is doing this in the same scale as the US, and nobody has the means to do it (except maybe China)

b) If I live in Sweden, and the Swedish government is snooping on me, I get both the good and the bad of it. If the US is spying on me, I only get the bad.

> (unless we accept that the US is the world government, and has the interest of all of us in its heart, which is ludicrous).

Only one of those statements is ludicrous.

They're also not allowed to use US-based spam/malware filtering could-style services, since that also means that the emails are sent to places where integrity can't be guaranteed.

They'd be mad not to forbid this, given that there's apparently no legal impediment to the US Government accessing non-citizen non-residents' Google accounts for the purpose of industrial espionage or political dirty tricks.

Sweden used to be self-sufficient enough to build their own cars, fighter jets and submarines. Let's hope we can tackle computing for this century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_80 :)

That's if enough engineers come out of KTH, Lund, etc with innovative ideas that aren't stifled to death by the whole lagom ethos in ole Sverige!

Last I checked Volvo is still building cars. The swedish Air Force most modern plane is JAS Gripen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen . The status on submarines is unknown to me though.

Swedish submarines are ok...

"Gotland managed to penetrate the defensive measures of Carrier Strike Group Seven undetected and snap several pictures of the USS Ronald Reagan during the December pre-deployment Joint Task Force Exercise 06-2 (JTFEX 06-2) in the Pacific Ocean (probably in the California Operating Areas), effectively "sinking" the aircraft carrier.[10] The exercise was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the US Fleet against modern diesel-electric submarines, which some have noted as severely lacking.[11][12]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSwMS_Gotland_(1995)

I wonder if this is also why Google has a special "Apps for Government", to not be included on the general public's servers.

It wouldn't make any difference though - as long as Google is running the service, it can be reached by a FAA 702 request.

This is common sense, not news..

Disgree.

Do you live somewhere where common sense is common?

The PUL (swedish privacy law) restricting where and how you can store information about citizens is quite famous (infamous?) among swedish technologists. Which is not saying that you're wrong, I wouldn't expect non-swedes to be familiar with it.

But still, isn't it sensible for the government to keep internal information within the national borders?

I've understood that most people have been surprised by the surveillance just because its in an area not many people pay attention to, but for a well run government to A. Not know this is going on or B. Not expect it, is inexcusable.

What's stopping the NSA from installing beam splitters outside of the US? The whole thing sounds like the anti-Japanese paranoia from the 1980s.

The NSA is not almighty. It has lots of resources, and the US can put lots of pressure in lots of places, but there will always be places out of reach. Thanks to whistle blowers we can get to know which places have fallen under US power, and route around that.

We can safely assume the whole US is not safe, because legislation forces companies to comply (or go to jail). Outside the US, not so easy.

The US has a nuclear submarine that was apparently modified to allow tapping of undersea communications cables:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29

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