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Thread: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

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    News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Head lawyer at Redmond suggests the move, to allay NSA snooping fears.
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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    They are still Microsoft servers, on the compromised Microsoft network....regardless of geo-location.

    Will this storage really be any more secure or less susceptible to US government snooping? I doubt it.
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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    ...and we know that Microsoft, as a US company, is likely to comply with requests from the US government or suffer at home. Would it really do that to protect 3rd party privacy? Until the EU or similar actually puts some (serious) teeth into the threats of data sharing without permission, it is easier for a US company to comply with the request and worry about the fine later. Superficially it looks like a very similar problem to foreign IT companies operating in China (e.g. Google - you're expected to behave like a US company or gather all the bad publicity for working with the Chinese government, but can't operate there without following the Chinese rules and requests for access from their government - you can't please both). When it comes to who could put the most pressure on MS - the US or a foreign government, I'm pretty sure the US would win every time.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Hmmm. So we're supposed to distrust the NSA, but trust MS?

    Am I the only one to see a fallacy with that logic?

    Personally, I'm not putting any confidential or personal data on cloud storage. Period. I don't care who holds it, or where. If it's on MY systems, all I have to worry about is MY security. Could a hacker get onto my machines? Some yes, if they really wanted to, and if they knew I existed. But the machines with stuff I really consider personal? No, they cannot. Absolutely cannot, unless they break in, physically. Even then, it's encrypted.

    For me, there's no need to store in the cloud, and ample reason not to. For you, whoever you are, business or individual, it's your data, your risk and your decision.

    One last point. Quite why are MS doing this? Concern for our privacy? Or concern for protecting their own business model and revenue streams? I know what I think. They knew of at least some of the NSAs activities LONG before we did. Did that prompt them to move servers? Or did growing public concern?

    Besides, as a US company, based in and operating from the US, they are subject to US laws and jurisdiction wherever they house servers. They've been telling us that no data is released to NSA without due process, and that NSA doesn't have direct access, for months. So what's changed? If they put their servers on Mars, and the NSA present them with a warrant, they have to give it up.

    This is, as far as I'm concerned, merely a PR stunt, and as a measure for keeping the NSA out of our data, utterly meaningless. All IMHO, of course.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Oh my word, I never thought this day would come. M$ is actually thinking about what their customers want! :O

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    PR/Marketing attempt to create a unique selling point. They wouldn't be able to protect data in ireland any more than they can now.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the Patriot Act allow the US Govt to demand access to any data under the control of any US company, regardless of where the data is located?

    I'm sure I remember a story about that a while back when Cloud Storage & Computing was taking off that a lot of EU and Asian companies were going to skip Google, Apple, MS et all because of it.

    Therefore having a data centre somewhere else does nothing to stop the US Govt going to MS and demanding access to any data they darn well please.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by zaph0d View Post
    Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the Patriot Act allow the US Govt to demand access to any data under the control of any US company, regardless of where the data is located?
    Yup, and a FISA order can legally bind them to explicitly deny such an order ever have been given, or lie, in other words.
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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by zaph0d View Post
    Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the Patriot Act allow the US Govt to demand access to any data under the control of any US company, regardless of where the data is located?
    The only way MS can make this work as they say they intend is by using their billions of dollars to mount an intense legal battle against the government. In other words, they have to be willing to challenge every single request for information they get in a court of law, and to appeal every time a judge rules in favor of the government.

    They'd have to spend a veritable fortune of lawsuit after lawsuit, and most likely get nothing in return for it. They are not going to do it, plain and simple.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by valhar2000 View Post
    They'd have to spend a veritable fortune of lawsuit after lawsuit, and most likely get nothing in return for it.
    Exactly. FISA courts are little more than rubber-stamping bureaucracies now.
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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by aidanjt View Post
    Exactly. FISA courts are little more than rubber-stamping bureaucracies now.
    Well, it's quite hard to know, one way or the other, because of the secrecy. They could be utterly rigorous in scrutiny, or stamping. How can we know?

    This is one of the moral issues with, for instance, anti-terror work.

    The idea is to protect the public. So, when you become aware of a dangerous individual with plans to commit atrocities, you cannot arrest them until plans or preparations are quite advanced, or you cannot prove, beyond reasonable doubt, what they're up to.

    Similarly, such as those on TPIMs, you cannot bring them tovtrial with oroducing the evudence, and you often cannot produce the intelligence without giving away how you got it, which in turn very likely eliminates the abiluty to get it that way in the future, which in turn, directly puts the public at risk.

    In other words, the requirements of open justice WILL hamper your ability to prevent terrorist outrages (for instance, but also things like drug trafficking and other organised crime).

    But if you don't have open justice, people will immediately suspect that secret courts have all sorts of hidden agendas, cover all sorts of abuses, and not without some justification.

    Intelligences services MUST be able to do some of their work in secret, and sometimes, the inferences of that are onerous, amd a price is paid, sometimes in lives. But quite possibly not as onerous, or costing as many lives, as doing everything in the open.

    Think back to WW2. We cracked Nazi high command codes, with Enigma being compromised. BUT .... had we reacted to everything we could have, we could have ended up saving lives and winning battles, byt the Nazis would work out how we knew so much, change their supposedly unbreakable codes, and we may have lost the war.

    Had intelligence services announced they'd just cracked Enigma, had we even been careless enough to always react to what we knew, we might still be living under the Third Reich today.

    That's obviously an extreme example, but the principle remains valid .... intelligence service activities, methods, and often operations have to remain secret, or they fail to work.

    FISA courts and orders being public may satisfy the demands of open justice, but the price may well be successful terrorist operations or even less success against drug traffickers and other organised crime than is currently the case.

    We myst not forget that if we hamoer the NSA, GCHQ, MI5/6 (and some of the other MIs and other agencies) too much, the beneficiaries will be Chineze intelligence, Russian intelligence, Iranian intellifence (not to mention the French, Mossad, and so on), Al Queda and other flavours of terrorist extremists and all sorts of flavours of serious and organised crime.

    Some degree of secrecy, including FISA courts, are unpalatable and offensive, but utterly necessary to be effective.

    I'll now sit back and wait for the inevitable deluge.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    ...but utterly necessary to be effective.
    Are they, though? Without complete transparency there's no way for the public to assess whether they are, in fact, utterly necessary to be effective. So the entire concept becomes self-defeating in a real democracy. In fact, as far as we can tell, the Patriot Act, FISA, TSA, homeland security, and all the God-knows-how-many billions of dollars of tax payers money wasted on all of that security theatre hasn't thwarted a single genuine terrorist attack (as in, not an FBI groomed patsy). And the situation is no better in the UK. Westminster keeps relentlessly dialling up the authoritarianism, and unsurprisingly, nothing improves for the public.
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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by aidanjt View Post
    Are they, though? Without complete transparency there's no way for the public to assess whether they are, in fact, utterly necessary to be effective. So the entire concept becomes self-defeating in a real democracy. In fact, as far as we can tell, the Patriot Act, FISA, TSA, homeland security, and all the God-knows-how-many billions of dollars of tax payers money wasted on all of that security theatre hasn't thwarted a single genuine terrorist attack (as in, not an FBI groomed patsy). And the situation is no better in the UK. Westminster keeps relentlessly dialling up the authoritarianism, and unsurprisingly, nothing improves for the public.
    I take your point, but it's about whether we can assess effectiveness without transparency. Do we yet have 100% transarency? Hell, no, IMHO. Not even close.

    If the intelligence services had been transparent about Enigma, it would have ceased to be an advantage.

    Hence the moral challenge.

    If the only way to convince the public is to be 100% transparent about intelligence successes is to detail what they've done and how they did it, it'll be at the cost of those methods no longer working.

    But if you aren't transparent, you cannot prove they methods work, and of course, the opportunity for abuses increases.

    The only way to be totally convincing is to be totally open, but as that means open to your enemies too, it means in order to completely convince the public, you have to put them at avoidable risk. Which rather breaches the first duty of the state, to protect the public.

    It's something of a conundrum.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    Could a hacker get onto my machines? Some yes, if they really wanted to, and if they knew I existed. But the machines with stuff I really consider personal? No, they cannot. Absolutely cannot, unless they break in, physically. Even then, it's encrypted.
    I wish had something to store that was so important to me that I needed to protect it in this way!

    I use dropbox and skydrive for ease of access (on my mobile if i need it/ can get to it from a friends PC), and because as much as i want to organise an off site backup, it's easier to let someone else do that.


    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    Some degree of secrecy, including FISA courts, are unpalatable and offensive, but utterly necessary to be effective.
    Agreed - it would be a much better world if such institutions were not necessary, but that's too much to hope for!

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by iamlorro View Post
    I wish had something to store that was so important to me that I needed to protect it in this way!

    ....
    Well, it all depends how you value what you have.

    1) Personal data. Bank records, household records, investment details, passwords, etc.

    2) A document archive. Every payslip, every bank statement, utility bill, birth certificate, share certificate, etc, all in an image archive.

    3) Medical records.

    4) Business financial records, tax records, statutory documents, minutes of meetings, companies house returns from my company secretary days, things I have to hold.

    5) Client data. From time to time, I do work to confidential client material that does have a commercial value for their competitors, be it internal company training material, or details of proposals and bids. It's not valuable enough to have teams of hackers/burglars after it, but IF it got out and it wasa leak from me, I could end up liable for consequential losses.

    6) A project I'm working on that, if (and it's a big if) could turn semi-retirement into a very substantial pension scheme, or even retirement. Or not.

    7) One copy of data archives and backups.

    But NOTHING about any of the above needs the internet, and some of it would be, for example, an identify-thief's golden dream. So why take the risk of a net-connected link?

    Some of the above is personal convenience, some merely day-to-day business, but all, being isolated from the net, is not subject to hackers, virus infections, trojans, ransomware, etc.

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    Re: News - Microsoft to offer non-US storage for non-US users?

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    Well, it all depends how you value what you have.

    ....

    But NOTHING about any of the above needs the internet, and some of it would be, for example, an identify-thief's golden dream. So why take the risk of a net-connected link?

    Some of the above is personal convenience, some merely day-to-day business, but all, being isolated from the net, is not subject to hackers, virus infections, trojans, ransomware, etc.
    Yup - because 80% of what you mentioned I don't have on my PC, I don't need to protect it.

    Hadn't thought about identity theft, but it's a good point.

    What concerns me more is companies that have my data (because I use / have used a service from them) and what they are doing to protect it. There are only so many steps I can take to limit my data on their systems, but it's out of my control as to how securely it's stored and whether they keep an eye on staff, ensure security patches are up to date etc.

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