How the U.S. is forcing Internet firms' hands on surveillance
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
So it's up to engineers building new products to incorporate security from the ground up. No more lip-service to 'Your privacy is important to us' but actual technical changes.
I feel the same way about ISP's handing over data for money and turning it into another profit center.
From my article: "A federal magistrate judge sided with the government, despite the fact that 'Carnivore would enable remote access to the ISP's network and would be under the exclusive control of government agents.'"
If you're running a company and care about your users' privacy, would you want an NSA black box with "remote access" -- remember, you can't log into it and don't know what it does -- inside your firewalls? It might be better to say: Okay, here's a process through which we'll give you a .tar.gz file of the account via Secure FTP. Just keep those NSA black boxes the hell away from us. Hello, PRISM.
My first Google hit, seems somewhat accurate: http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/hp-admits-undocumen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
Is there some decent management tool that would allow tracking/commenting on popular news-websites? This is something where I would approve of a voting ring system.
The article seems to answer a different question: "Why do Internet firms invest resources in implementing software which aids the NSA's surveillance?" Because otherwise, the NSA will build it themselves, and force the companies to install it inside their datacenters.
The efficacy of boycotting is pretty dubious given that prism is probably just one program of many being employed by the NSA and other governmental agencies.
Put another way, there are some actual terrorists/spies/etc. out there, even if the number of terrorists is far lower than the government would like you to believe. If the NSA serves Microsoft with, say, 10 or 100 lawful orders a year to eavesdrop on those communications, is that something worthy of working with "dedication" to prevent? Probably not.
What the companies should be doing is encrypting what they can to frustrate wholesale surveillance. Which Microsoft isn't doing. Which I wrote about here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/
That means Verizon might have "only" received 4 FISA orders a year.
The Facebook etc. statements were designed to address precisely the concern you raised. Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, have remained very, very quiet. For good reason: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591391-38/surveillance-p...
Ah, it's ok then.
A manual process would ensure that the number of requests is kept reasonable.
Tax structures are intentionally written to leave openings (like the double irish), courtesy of lobbyists. And it doesn't take much effort to do it. For every politician that wants to bust Google for dodging taxes, there's one that wants to give them huge tax breaks for putting a data center in their state, and so on.
When it comes to jurisdiction, the US Government has essentially no power, via the tax code or otherwise, to force Google to pay taxes on foreign profits unless the money is repatriated.
The same is not true about national security. Political alignment is almost entirely on the side of giving the government more power for 'security' purposes.
When it comes to national security laws, and having your corporation located in the US, you can forget about fighting back and winning. The laws are in place, and they can not be rolled back without a fundamental culture / attitude shift among Americans. It's arguable, in my opinion, that it's dangerous to fight the government on these issues (eg Joe Nacchio / Qwest). That's not to say someone shouldn't do it, but when your personal well being may be at risk, very few executives are likely to put their comfortable living on the line.
Lobbying about taxes? Half the government is likely to be on your side when you do. Nobody really cares if you do that by comparison to national security issues.
Personally, I think every bill that goes to congress should be written by the congressmen and women and their staff and not by any outside agencies and consultants. Showing that a law was not written by those that were elected should invalidate the law.
BTW I'm hosting an event in SF with EFF on this topic later this month. On July 22. Details TK.
Point is the writing-the-bills issue (and even the reading-the-bills issue) is a symptom of the problem, not the actual problem itself.
That's the rule I have for my kids, if they claim they understand what I'm telling them, I require them to state it back to me in their own words. Seems like a reasonable expectation of the people hired to represent us.
http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-api-releas...
Any significance to the timing?