Cloud computing law puts Canadian users at risk of snooping by American spies
February 3, 2013
Grazed from The Ottawa Citizen. Author: Ian Macleod.
American spies can snoop through Canadians’ computer data — including that of political organizations and without warrants — if the data resides within popular U.S. cloud computing services, says a former Microsoft executive.
In a report commissioned by the European Parliament, former Microsoft chief privacy adviser Caspar Bowden reveals, “it is lawful in the U.S. to conduct purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data accessible in U.S. clouds,” operated by U.S. firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM and others. One sweeping provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the targeting of, “foreign-based political organization(s)… or foreign territory that relates to… conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.”…
While other contentious U.S. post-9/11 laws, such as the Patriot Act, significantly lifted restrictions on government surveillance, Bowden says the foreign surveillance law, “for the first time (has) created a power of mass-surveillance specifically targeted at the data of non-U.S. persons located outside the U.S., which applies to cloud computing.”…
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