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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

Popquiz: where could OVH move to that wouldn't be subject to heinous government surveillance? There aren't many safe havens left in the world, beyond the 5-eyes/Euro-clan reach ..

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There's a lot of places in Europe they could move to that won't be as bad as what France is trying to do, they also have a nice footprint in Canada (obviously this wouldn't really help customers in Europe that want to be close).

The big issue here isn't about NSA style monitoring of "the Internet", it's about black boxes that would be required to be installed in their network to do whatever monitoring they wanted.

You mean legally doing that. They're already illegally doing it in various trenches, and so on, anyway. And that is sort of the point.

I think this is a tiger vs. paperbag issue, personally. The fact is, if companies are serious, they'll start setting up their own encrypted links, actively, and fighting back. Then it won't be an issue where, locality-wise, you set up the servers.

Finland is at least attempting to remain a country without any (official) spying.

Combine that with ample free space for server farms in the form of closed army bases inside mountains and old factories and you have a nice home for a bunch of servers even on a large scale.

But we won't know for sure until this years' elections how the political environment changes wrt to internet spying.

What Finland is attempting seems to depend on which ministry you ask.

Good question!

Is there any organization that works on an regularly updated list of states and their current surveillance situation?

if not, should this exist?

E.g. awesome-bigbrother

Octave said they are considering building new datacenters in Germany, Italy and Poland.

But Germany, at least, is happily cooperating with the NSA. And didn't Poland host CIA black sites?

Both have nothing to do with SIP surveilled through black boxes and intelligence agents being cleared to destroy informatic systems.

I can't imagine a government finding black sites completely acceptable but balking at global Internet surveillance. As for Germany, it depends on how closely they were cooperating with the NSA and how much they were willing to invade the privacy of EU citizens.

I think it'd be more pertinent to see what was the reaction of Polish people to a perceived attempt at limiting their Internet freedom in 2012:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agree...

https://www.google.com/search?q=protesty+na+ulicach+acta&biw...

Keep in mind that the memories of communist censorship are still quite vivid, and so the electorate is quite sensitive about any kind of surveillance.

That's a fair point. On the other hand, keep in mind that the corollary of "law on mass surveillance purpose-built to legalize existing practices" is that French citizens are already "benefiting" from secret mass surveillance (emphasis on secret). Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to prove or disprove the existence of a similar effort in Poland. Whether the population agrees or not is irrelevant if elected officials conspire to keep them in the dark about it because security.

Isn't Iceland pretty anti-surveillance still?

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