From the
Snowden leaks to the recent passage of the Brazilian government
“Marco Civil da Internet”,
a set of legislation designed to enforce net neutrality, freedom of
expression and privacy, there is no mistaking that this is a critical
time for the internet and it’s digital citizens.
Cloud and hosting providers need to pay close attention to developing
legislation and technologies to address the privacy and security needs
of its customers in this fast changing environment.
Shortly after the NSA’s PRISM program was first reported,
Forrester Research predicted that US cloud providers could lose up to $180 billion in business over the next three years due to concerns around the scope of surveillance the program enabled.
In a
March Ted Talk Snowden said,
“The best way to understand PRISM, because there has been a little bit
of controversy, is to first talk about what prism isn’t. Much of the
debate in the US has been about meta data. They’ve said ‘it’s just meta
data, it’s just meta data’ and they’re talking about a specific legal
authority called section 215 of the Patriot Act. That allows sort of a
warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country’s sort
of phone records, things like that…PRISM is about content, it’s a
program through which the government could compel corporate America, it
could sort of deputize corporate America to do it’s dirty work for the
NSA.”
Some companies initially resisted compliance, challenging the NSA in court, but they all lost. Later after the Snowden revelations, a
new ruling forced the declassifying of the 2008 Prism decision.
“It was never tried by an open court, they were tried only by a
secret court,” Snowden said. “And something that we’ve seen…15 federal
judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but
what they don’t tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court
based on secret interpretations of law that’s considered 34,000 warrant
requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government
requests.
These aren’t the people that we want deciding what the role of
corporate America in a free and open internet should be.”
Although the NSA continually tries to explain the measures and
secrets as an important part of national security and characterizes its
data collection as “only meta data”, it’s having a hard time spinning
the Snowden revelations in its favor. Even late night political
comedians are picking up on this topic. John Oliver addressed NSA
policies Sunday in
an interview with former NSA agency chief Keith Alexander which resulted in a funny yet powerful commentary on the organization.
In a blog post Monday, the NSA again addressed its policies in relation to internet security and the
Heartbleed vulnerability. It explained
some of its thinking on keeping threats secret.
“But there are legitimate pros and cons to the decision to disclose,
and the trade-offs between prompt disclosure and withholding knowledge
of some vulnerabilities for a limited time can have significant
consequences,” Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president and
cybersecurity coordinator said.
“Disclosing a vulnerability can mean
that we forego an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could
thwart a terrorist attack stop the theft of our nation’s intellectual
property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being
used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks.”
Discussion and news on privacy, net neutrality and data sovereignty
happens daily. Multi- stakeholder governance as a means to address
keeping governments out of the internet or at least equally represented
is a hot topic. At the two day
NetMundail conference last week, guidelines were discussed for future internet governance.
As the discussion continues to evolve it’s important for cloud and
web hosting providers to stay informed of the issues and new legislation
so they can best serve their customers in whatever part of the globe
they happen to be. As cloud services
become more prevalent
and are hosted in multiple countries, service providers may be facing
more restrictions based on where data is physically stored and which
country has domain over the data.
The WHIR interviewed
Jelle Frank van der Zwet of Interxion
at World Hosting Days in Germany. When asked about the need for data
centers in foreign countries, he had this to say, “If you want to do
business in Germany, you must have a data center and infrastructure in
Germany. That goes for Amazon, that goes for any cloud provider, small
or large if you want to do business in Germany I recommend you have your
infrastructure in Germany. I would say the same for France.”
His comment in the context of the greater discussion about data
sovereignty and NSA backdoor access into United States based company’s
data underscores the importance of where data is hosted in relation to
local laws and policies, a growing concern among cloud and hosting
providers.
For example, the
US Supreme Court ruled recently that a government search warrant
will require American companies providing internet, email, and online
storage services to hand over data stored anywhere in the world.
Read more: Orwellian Big Brother is a Reality: Government in Your Internet - WHIR
