Why The NSA Is The Least Of Your Cloud Concerns
August 29, 2013
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Elgan.
Revelations over the NSA’s aggressive data collection have ignited fears that customers will abandon U.S. cloud companies—or even cloud computing itself. The fears are unfounded and will dissolve. Here’s why…
What We Know So Far
The U.S. National Security Agency harvests communication metadata—who talked for how long on what device, etc.—in a program the NSA calls MAINWAY. It’s collected and stored; it’s also processed to discover suspicious activity. For example, if a terror suspect is apprehended, the metadata for people he contacted in the past may be analyzed…
Another related program, called PRISM, enables the NSA to gather information in two ways. The first is by request. The NSA may ask (say) Facebook for all activity by certain people or groups of people, which Facebook deposits into an electronic “lock box”. From there, it can be downloaded by the NSA. PRISM is not about metadata, but actual data…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2013/08/29/nsa-is-least-of-cloud-concerns/