I wish we pushed for a law that said you can only serve a warrant for a data request to the person whose data you want. I think from a human rights principle it makes the most sense. The only reason the government can take it from <i>third parties that store our data for us</i> is because it's "easier" for them to do that, and because there hasn't been enough pushback against it.<p>Imagine if the government said "hey, that money in your bank account, we can just automatically take our taxes from it, because we're not really taking it from <i>you</i>, we're just taking it from the <i>bank</i>." Probably not the most accurate analogy, but I think you see where I'm going with this.<p>Since the ruling that invalidated Safe Harbor, Microsoft has been pushing for laws and agreements between nations that say law enforcement shouldn't be coming to Microsoft (as a cloud service provider) with a warrant for data requests, but to their <i>corporate customers</i>. So for instance, if FastMail uses the Azure cloud service, they're saying that if the government wants access to a user's data, they shouldn't be going to Microsoft but to FastMail with the warrant.<p>It's a small improvement, but Microsoft and all of the other companies should be pushing so this works for <i>all</i> of their customers, not just the corporate ones. It's exactly the same principle, but Microsoft just takes the easier way out here, because that still gets them off the hook, and it's really what they care most about. The corporations (even if they are "people") shouldn't be having <i>more rights</i> than <i>actual people</i>.
It's an amazing racket, the art of making criminals out of ordinary citizens, a racket the US government has got down pat. I have to really hand it to them. When the country and the world no longer requires their existence, they keep coming up with faux reasons for continuing to exist, faux reasons for arresting, torturing, and murdering innocent people, faux reasons to continue to get funding and hurt more innocent people.<p>You'd almost think that this country no longer has problems (at least none it <i>wants</i> to solve so poverty, justice, racism, education, healthcare, etc. are out), that government's new role is to create problems simply so it can solve them all while making money in the process and justifying its unconstitutional existence. Then you'd be right.
They reference this article, which was also interesting: <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/the-most-important-tech-company-youve-never-heard" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/the-most-important-tech-compa...</a>
I've always presumed that ALL of my online activities are visible to the government or other nosy parties. I do stupid things sometimes, but not really stupid.
Two things:<p>(1) The NSA is there to protect us, in theory.<p>(2) There will never, ever be guaranteed privacy or security as long as you continue to use other people's equipment and network. Using the internet expecting privacy is like continually saying, "I'm going to have sex with everyone and going to complain about the people that have STD's."<p>You could try: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network</a><p>Or: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet</a><p>Those are a <i>little</i> safer.