Thanks, NSA, you’re killing the cloud

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Last week, news broke that the NSA has been spying on Verizon customer in the United States. The bulletin came via the Guardian, which had obtained a copy of a secret court order allowing the NSA to spy on millions of Verizon customers. As reported by Glenn Greenwald: "The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing."

This development has multiple implications for U.S. citizens, but high-tech industries will feel a distinctive hit. It seems that we only recently addressed fears over the Patriot Act and the notion that the U.S. government could seize the servers containing your data from your cloud provider. It was certainly possible, but not likely…

Now, we have a documented instance where the government has been peeking at personal communication records with the objective of spotting the bad guys. A few million Verizon customers must be feeling a bit confused if not downright violated at this point. As we migrate to public clouds, the most vocal protestors against this shift also happen to believe the data is at more risk for government monitoring. While you can show them mechanisms and statistics that demonstrate the value of leveraging public clouds, the "NSA scandal" will provide more fuel for the already cloud-paranoid…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/thanks-nsa-youre-killing-the-cloud-220434