Amazon Vows To Fight Government Requests For Data

itwbennett writes "Speaking at a cloud panel discussion hosted by Reuters on Wednesday, Terry Wise, head of global partner ecosystem for Amazon Web Services, explained how the company handles government requests for data stored on Amazon's cloud: 'If a U.S. entity is serving us with a legally binding subpoena, we contact our customer and work with that customer to fight the subpoena.' But Wise's best advice to customers is to encrypt their data: 'If the data is encrypted, all we'd be handing over would be the cypher text,' he said."

Silence is Golden

[Anonymous Coward]

I can foresee a time when it won't be safe to even talk among ourselves. We'll need to send encrypted text messages to the person next to us.

You Brave Companies, You

[RyoShin]

How nice that, after these revelations, suddenly all of these companies are coming forward with data and vows to fight or announcing requests to reveal information, etc. Where were these Brave Defenders of Consumers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCitizens before Snowden?

(Of course, without the public knowledge it would be a lot easier for the government to silence businesses or influential people who did try to fight this stuff, but something tells me that all of this is about trying to re-establish consumer trust and loyalty, and is shit-all about trying to protect our Fourth Amendment rights.)

Ahem...

[SJ]

This is the same Amazon that just won an $800m bid to host the CIA's cloud computing system?

Uh huh.

This is truly the problem with NSA spying..

[HerculesMO]

It tells the rest of the world that your data is not safe in the USA, and our cloud service providers are not to be trusted (along with our banks, our ISPs in general, our telecom companies, etc).

There will be a boom to companies who are situated in more open societies in the next few years providing these services without the watchful thumb (presumably) of the NSA and other organizations. Right now Amazon and everybody else, even if they didn't cooperate with the NSA, are now subject to the US government's stupidity in proposing big brother and not realizing how it may harm our trade.

But you know... freedom rah rah rah.

Re:This is truly the problem with NSA spying..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to go out on a limb, post as AC, and ask: what open societies?

If you put servers in China, you KNOW they do the same thing as the NSA, not to mention worse (Great Firewall of China.) In fact, China, by law, owns 51% of any extension of a firm doing business there.

Russia? Perhaps, except the shadow of the old Soviet Union still is present.

Europe? Right now, they are the pinnacle of global civilization and freedom now, but who knows how long that will stand. Germany is subject to Russia's whims, since if the gas gets turned off, they will freeze to death in the thousands (as they gave up their sovereignty in return for being able to be nuclear-free.)

Sweden/Norway/Finland as a subset of Europe? Probably the best place to open a business in the world as it stands now... who knows in the future.

Africa? No real infrastructure, and most of the continent would not even have a stable government to protect a data center from guys with technicals and machine guns from raiding the place on whims.

India? These guys broke the back of Skype and RIM demanding eavesdropping points.

Middle East? Perhaps Israel, but anywhere else, one goof, and all the equipment would be seized.

I'm going to also go further out on the limb and state this:

I have a few co-located servers behind a decent firewall and IDS/IPS. I constantly get barraged by hack attempts from China, India, and Russia. The SSH daemon gets slammed even with sshguard in place. I looked at locating servers in China, and they demanded a local firm there own them, giving me a minority stake.

So far, the NSA has been the least of the threats to what I'm doing. In fact, SELinux has probably saved the hide of my webserver a few times. If the NSA gets my business records, who the fuck cares. They don't share them even with domestic firms, while if the PLA gets anything, they will become Chinese property, just like the blueprints for PV panels did (which allowed them to dump panels for cheaper than the rare earths needed until Congress finally tacked on a tariff.)

I'm far more worried about a burglar attacking the co-loc I have my stuff at than anything the NSA does. In fact, the NSA has -helped- my little business's operational security, so even though this is unpopular, I will say that the NSA is not on my worry list whatsoever.

Locating servers in the US, I really don't have much to be afraid of. The NSA may get access to something I have at the worst, but I won't have my servers shut down, and some US company start making my exact product.

So, choose your evils wisely.

Re:You Brave Companies, You

[Drakonblayde]

I too have my doubts about the sincerity of corporate entities who are in the business of relieving folks of their money. I also think they're in spin control mode.

But, when you get right down to it, their advice is not wrong. It behooves us brainy type peoples to ignore the political and social connotations that prompted such announcements and distill the subject matter down to it's essence and ultimately determine whether or the information is correct or not.

Mobile morals

[boundary]

All of a sudden these huge companies that own all our data are vowing to fight this, divulge that, release this, resist that. Shame they weren't willing to do all that ethical shit before the middle of last week when they were all caught with their pants down.