Cloud Service Providers Fight Back, Challenge NSA
February 26, 2014
Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.
For U.S. cloud computing companies that have long been fighting to defend the privacy protections involving data stored in their servers or passing over their networks, the ongoing revelations about the extent of the NSA’s surveillance activities could carry a huge price tag. For years, in markets such as Western Europe, cloud providers like Google and Microsoft have been trying to beat back concerns voiced by would-be customers — and stoked by competitors and governments — that the Patriot Act and other laws render data stored with American firms readily accessible to the U.S. government.
But the protectionist policies that some countries were pursuing — restricting cross-border data flows or requiring local hosting, for instance — had been a nuisance, but they didn’t seem pervasive enough to challenge U.S. hegemony in the cloud sector. The equation began to change dramatically last June, when media outlets first began reporting on widespread electronic surveillance programs at the NSA, Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said Tuesday at a policy discussion on the fallout of the disclosures of former government contractor Edward Snowden…
"Then the revelations come and people start saying, ‘Well, what’s going to happen?’" Castro says. "Everyone’s angry and they start saying, ‘Can we trust the United States? Can we trust the United States with our data?’ We’ve had these conversations before, especially around the Patriot Act. We knew that other countries have been using this argument for a long time, but suddenly they had a trump card. Suddenly they had something very clear to point to and say, ‘This is why you shouldn’t use Google. This is why you shouldn’t use whatever — any U.S. company — insert the name there.’"…
Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/748791/Cloud_Service_Providers_Fight_Back_Challenge_NSA?taxonomyId=3089
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