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Comment by fosap | Hacker News Reader

Host your valuable business secrets with easy NSA access.

Same here, since the Snowden revelations we have absolutely no interest in storing ANYTHING in the US.

Dropbox is a great Tool, no question, but if you're a company (outside of the US) you should think about what you store where.

I'm fine with Dropbox, but there's my Boss, you know.

A good alternative outside the US is http://www.jottacloud.com/. Servers in Norway.

This probably puts you at even greater risk, since the intelligence folks don't even have the pretense of rule of law once you're outside the borders. That, and the Nordic countries have traditionally been very friendly to U.S. req^H^H^Hdemands for information.

Easier (legally) for NSA folk or other bad actors to hack yes. But when did that stop them?

But if your data never crosses a US border (E.g. a Norwegian person using jottacloud), then the NSA cable taps have no effect. If your server is not in a US server farm or in a US Company, then it can't be subverted at destination the way that lavabit was going to go (and the other major companies have already gone).

I'm really suspicious of this "safer in the USA" stuff right now.

> "if your data never crosses a US border (E.g. a Norwegian person using jottacloud), then the NSA cable taps have no effect"

Perhaps, as pertains to the taps we were warned about by Mark Klein, Snowden, et al. But if you think that's the full extent of US intelligence taps, Angela Merkel's cell phone rather disagrees. (And the notion that they'd tap a half dozen foreign leaders before they tapped a trunk line or five is pretty laughable.)

I somehow doubt the NSA is going to be constrained because it doesn't cross a border. With the NSA's money and engineering resources, I don't really think any data is safe anywhere.

> I somehow doubt the NSA is going to be constrained because it doesn't cross a border.

That taps at borders which NSA / GCHQ have legal access to are well documented: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/operation-temp...

Other borders ... not so much.

> With the NSA's money and engineering resources, I don't really think any data is safe anywhere.

The NSA are legally constrained. They can't walk into a data center in Germany waving a court order and insist on a tap and no publicity. This is essentially what happened to lavabit because their data center was in the US. Yeah, a data center in Europe could be hacked. but:

1) Any bad actor could try to do this

2) Trying to do this in a notionally friendly country is not the most diplomatic thing. Not saying it can't happen but it would be arrogant and risky. Consider the fallout if some disgruntled sysadmin drops dox on it. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/nsa-s-alleged-spying-on-merkel-...

It shouldn't matter where you're hosting, if you want privacy it needs to be encrypted by you. The NSA can still get its hands on data outside of the US, but regardless of where something is stored you can lock it up fairly easily.

It's easier for them to access when it's stored outside of the United States... you get that, right?

There are laws in the US that they attempt to abide by that make this more difficult domestically, but not as difficult on foreign soil.

Laws without a publicly reviewable adversarial judicial process are kinda like backups without verification, right? Its probably better than nothing, but you don't know the difference until something goes wrong.

You could always use Boxcryptor (https://www.boxcryptor.com/)

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