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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to believe that the authorities in Germany are not also tapping lines like France or the UK. Do we have any proof that is the case? I agree this has made me think twice about hosting in the us, but also about crossing national boundaries full stop without encrypting traffic.

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Encrypting is a given - obviously you'd want to only be using Saas services in Germany etc that are fully encrypted. The problem in using USA services is that even if everything is fully encrypted, the USA can and will send goons around to take your data. Encryption is simply useless when dealing with a company in the USA who is forced to hand over the keys and whose data-centers can be legally entered and modified by thugs. Once someone has physical access to the server, the game is over.

Germany is a better bet. While they are no doubt tapping lines, Germany and the EU have made no moves to actually perform hostile interventions into data-centers or private servers. This means that encryption is still a very viable security measure for protecting your data in the EU. The EU simply has a far better track record with privacy related issues.

It's not about perfect security, it's about getting the best security you can hope for - and that means moving away from anything USA hosted.

Don't choose Germany. We may have strict privacy laws here, but we also have the BND cooperating with the NSA, tapping directly into the main internet nodes (Frankfurt). And don't forget that part of the method of the NSA is to use a mule inside the target company, which would be very easy in Germany given its status of being a wannabe ally of the USA and the longstanding sympathy of the german public for the USA.

And Germany has also laws which force every mail provider to install an access point to the German authorities and intelligence agencies. I am not sure if also a generic saas platform would have to do it, but it is quite possible.

Better pick Switzerland or Island.

"And Germany has also laws which force every mail provider to install an access point to the German authorities and intelligence agencies. I am not sure if also a generic saas platform would have to do it, but it is quite possible."

Thanks for the heads up - as I said in the OP, it really is a difficult task. Those kind of laws are exactly what need to be avoided when choosing a country to host in. I don't believe that this kind of thing can be carried out in absolute silence though, so if a country is actively modifying and silencing hosts it's fairly likely that word of it will leak somewhere.

If I get a chance, I might try to put together a red/orange/green overview of known laws and practices in different countries that would affect hosting services there. Unless someone is already working on that and needs a hand?

Since there seems to be some interest, I put together a very simple map with a couple countries filled in at random with shaky data.

It's up on github, so hopefully everyone can submit pull requests with data and we can crowd source ourselves a very informative map.

https://github.com/Ryan-ZA/hosting_safety_map

EDIT: I also submitted a link to it on HN. Hopefully interested people will see it and can help out with data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182001

I was surprised to see Canada green on that map.

We have a great privacy commissioner ( http://www.priv.gc.ca/index_e.asp ) but the office holds no power so far as I can see, and the Canadian government has a pretty solid track record of being obsequiously cooperative with u.s. interests

Canada is green simply because nobody familiar with Canada's security politics and policies has chimed in yet and there does not seem to be any evidence of foul play that is visible from an outsider's perspective.

Cooperative with U.S. interests is generally assumed by almost any country - this map is more about the (hopeful) safety of your servers in data centers in different countries.

I think you can pretty much colour the Echelon Five Eyes countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand) red right off the bat. If they don't have totally intrusive surveillance legislation yet they will have soon - New Zealand is currently trying to implement it.

Please do this! This would actually be very useful..

Please do. If there's anything I can do to help, reply to this comment as I don't have any contact info on my profile.

If you do that, could you send me a mail? I'd be interested.

It took me a while to understand that you probably mean Iceland.

I did - Island is german name. Happens from time to time that I mix languages.

EU is a very generic term here. There is very little consistency across member states on this topic; UK laws, for example, are probably worse than US ones in most cases. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe Italian ones aren't much better atm.

The short-term answer is to encrypt everything users have to store, and don't handle their keys, but it's a stop-gap: the only real answer is political and that's where things have to be fixed for good.

Then the most obvious answer to me seems to use technology to affect the political landscape.

How that actually manifests itself, depends on how desperate people become to retain some sovereignty over their livelihoods… which begs the question, where are we now and who could provide the resources/environment to foster the type of change that is needed?

Where exactly are these keys going to be stored?

Users can not and will not securely manage key material.

The EU has minimum standards for surveillance and most EU member states are clearly American vassals. Even France proved to a vasall in forcing the Bolivian president's aircraft to make an unplanned stopover in Vienna … and even the neutral countries are full in favor of surveillance – Switzerland for example is just revising its surveillance laws and many other legal areas, for example copyright, see an increased level of surveilance too.

I thought France disavowed that involvement? Wasn't it just Austria bloviating, or was it hasty ass-covering by France?

Germany sends goons to take data as well, as does every country in Europe.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/german-police-sei...

Line tapping is pretty much a given. Looks like the BND has the possibility to do so. But this is still not officially confirmed. However a german blogger (fefe) had some examples for overly detailled dementi from german companies. E.g. no foreign intelligence service can read your traffic...

But in regards to cryptography and chances for legally fighting against such orders it could be better. At least on paper. The most likely outcome if lavabit would be hosted in germany would be a police raid that would take all servers for investigation with them. This happenend e.g. for poeple running Tor exit nodes.

If you're German, would you prefer to be surveilled by the German government or by both the US and German governments?

If you're in the US it seems kinda pointless to try to move to overseas hosting; the NSA will probably just focus on the client side.

Under data sharing agreements, if the NSA takes an interest, your data will probably go to them without questions or oversight. Drone bases (Ramstein) and listening stations (Dagger Complex) are located in Germany, and Germany was one of the most targeted locations in the boundless informant set of slides. It's probably illegal, and hopefully will be challenged in court, but it does apparently go on on a massive scale, with or without our consent.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/bild-908609-515222...

Accountability and culture. German intelligence services are "weaker" in the sense that they (seemlingly) still are under the control of the legislative body (secret contracts with the Western Allies sadly nonwithstanding). They are also regarded with deep distrust by large parts of the populace and by a significant segment of the legislature.

It is quite possbible that, come September, some of the government parties might lose a few percentage points due to the citizens being annoyed about the erosion of the rule of law. We'll see.

>Accountability and culture

The culture that brought us the SS and the Stasi.

This may be the most ignorant comment I've ever -- and I mean ever -- read on a web discussion board. And I frequent many discussion boards.

Current German culture is equivalent to German culture under the Third Reich? Really?

Is current American culture equivalent to early-through-mid 19th century American culture? Should we discount everything the USA does because you once kept/traded/abused black people as property? Then continued to legislate such thinking via Jim Crow well into the 20th century?

Now that I look, I notice your post history is littered with anti-German racism rooted in complete historical ignorance. I'm wondering what your angle is.

No, it's the reverse. The nazi era and the Stasi have resulted in a modern Germany that is fiercely oppositional to anything that leads in this direction.

There are very strong open source, transparency and anti surveillance movements in Germany. Stasi is the entire reason WHY we have strong privacy laws here.

As Goebbels pointed out, all it takes is the right kind of threat, either real or manufactured ("Think of the children!"), and those "transparency movements" you speak of will fade out more rapidly than the grandparent post.

That doesn't work as well if the culture has been inocculated.

How does one do that?

Well, I don't know if this is still done today, but when I was in 7th or 8th grade, they (school) drove us, by the busload, to visit a concentration camp.

We were shown the lampshades and wallets made of human skin. The place to stand where inmates would be executed during what they thought were medical examinations. And so on and so on.

It is quite possible that the next "Western" genocide will happen somewhere in Europe. But as somebody who has grown up here, I can assure you it won't be in Germany.

I just wish that history was thaught like this everywhere.

I have to agree. I spent two days in Berlin this week and went to the Holocaust memorial, etc. I was impressed with the way these things are talked about with such openness - to make sure that this stuff never happens again. Also, I've traveled to several european countries and found Germans to be quite open minded regarding race, religion, etc. since I think the past has a lot to do with that. Happy that the german education system and culture appears to have a strong culture of 'learning from mistakes'. Clearly that isn't the case for the US with Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Iraq.

To be fair there are still lots of racist and intolerant people here. And nazis, though the antifa usually kick their asses.

But the tolerant and open minded strain is pretty dominant. Germany is 9% foreigners. Frankfurt is like 30%

  The culture that brought us the SS and the Stasi.

Really? Really? With an account that is as old as yours you cannot avoid posting a comment like this? Do you consider that mature? Useful? Reasonable?

I don't. You just disqualified yourself from any meaningful discussion, ever.

My wife treated people with mental issues for some time and I have the utmost respect for people that can handle this stuff.

You, instead, are without protection. You post stuff like this and shout out to the world that you have no clue, that you have no idea what your are talking about, what the topic of this thread is and .. just show that HN really should provide a feature to ignore other people.

Please - go away. You didn't contribute and you're a sad, sad idiot.

Bad memories of those periods are a non-trivial part of why they are surveillance adverse today.

The difference is that the authorities in Germany don't have the legal framework to force someone to do this and threaten them to stay silent.

Ostensibly the US doesn't have that framework either, the Constitution would seem to preclude it (I realize we are talking about a myriad of offenses at this point so it may get hazy). But as you can see, shit gets ignored. Secret government agencies in Germany could ignore laws there just as easily as the NSA does in the US.

There are no countries where you are allowed to go public on surveillance measures applied to your customers, user etc. – at least not before the surveillance has been completed. And while traditional surveillance measures have an end, today's +/- total surveillance is continous.

At some point, maybe the citizens of the world will understand that laws don't apply to the people who make them. They never have, and they never will.

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