The Fourth Amendment and the Cloud 174
CNET has up a blog post examining the question: does the Fourth Amendment apply to data stored in the Cloud? The US constitutional amendment forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures is well settled in regard to the physical world, but its application to electronic communications and computing lags behind. The post's argument outlines a law review article (PDF) from a University of Minnesota law student, David A. Couillard. "Hypothetically, if a briefcase is locked with a combination lock, the government could attempt to guess the combination until the briefcase unlocked; but because the briefcase is opaque, there is still a reasonable expectation of privacy in the unlocked container. In the context of virtual containers in the cloud...encryption is not simply a virtual lock and key; it is virtual opacity. ... [T]he service provider has a copy of the keys to a user's cloud 'storage unit,' much like a landlord or storage locker owner has keys to a tenant's space, a bank has the keys to a safe deposit box, and a postal carrier has the keys to a mailbox. Yet that does not give law enforcement the authority to use those third parties as a means to enter a private space. The same rationale should apply to the cloud." We might wish that the courts interpreted Fourth Amendment rights in this way, but so far they have not.
US Border Laptop Searches (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score:4, Insightful)
I see your point and raise you a generalization; The US is getting to the point where one should just ask "do any of the amendments apply now?".
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No string bets please. The pot stands at one 4th amendment plus the justice is blinds.
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I see your point and raise you a generalization; The US is getting to the point where one should just ask "do any of the amendments apply now?".
I haven't been forced to house soldiers yet, so we've still got one.
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Yes, the one where the federal government gets to levy individual income tax.
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none of the bill of rights has any meaning left
Not true. The US government will not quarter troops in your home without your consent. In addition, jury trials are still available for federal lawsuits.
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In the case of the Third Amendment, in its one and only significant use, it was upheld:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engblom_v._Carey [wikipedia.org]
Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score:5, Insightful)
When you are a foreign citizen, searching laptops, personal electronic devices and so on is just a prerequisite for entering the country (if you don't want your laptops to be searched, you are free to leave, but if you want to enter we need to search your laptop).
I don't know how this can be related to US citizens (as a country should not be/is not allowed to refuse entry to its citizens)
Remember that searching personal effects is rarely done, but entirely normal in border posts
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if you don't want your laptops to be searched, you are free to leave, but if you want to enter we need to search your laptop
Need? Want I can see, and I appreciate that submitting to the search is a condition of being granted entry, but I really don't see where the need comes from.
I don't know how this can be related to US citizens (as a country should not be/is not allowed to refuse entry to its citizens)
So they can't refuse you entry; surely (assuming the law permits it) they can have you arrested and poss
Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score:5, Insightful)
The legality of the contents of the laptop can be contested if I am arrested within the US and the laptop seized as evidence. Until that point, that laptop is a sealed envelope; X-ray and perform a cursory physical examination all you like to ensure that it is a laptop computer, but like the documents inside the envelope, the content of the disk is not subject to being examined or duplicated.
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Hmm... perhaps you could just put your laptop in an envelope. I wonder if that would work.
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Try applying that to say, driving across the border where you're no more a hazard than anywhere else on the road. Right or wrong, countries have asserted the right to search anyone and anything on the border before letting them into the country.
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Maybe even without a flight (Canada, Mexico, naval entry points)
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The current method seems to hand them to idiots with the reading comprehension of a limp lettuce leaf.
While avoiding giving them to those of us who have been registered users and frequent readers/contributors for years and who have been at the karma cap since it was still displayed as a number.
In fact for a long time I couldn't even meta-moderate; I have no idea what crime I committed (nor to be honest do I care anywhere near enough to try to find out).
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The only way to get fourth amendment protection in the cloud is to protect your rights yourself. If you don't want the government reading everything you put in the cloud, use military-grade encryption. Remember: you only have rights if you are willing to defend those rights. Otherwise, they're just words on toilet paper.
Yeah, a lot of posts are getting modded Troll lately. I can only conclude that the last batch of mod points w
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I don't know how this can be related to US citizens
You don't say it explicitly, but I get the feeling that you believe the Bill of Rights and the other rights enumerated in the US Constitution only applies to US Citizens. If so, I urge you and others that believe this to take a closer look at the document. The Founders were extrememly careful and deliberate. If it were the case surely the Preamble would begin "We the citizens...." It does not.
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Whoa whoa whoa, interpreting what the founders "would have" put in the Constitution if they meant some certain thing is a ridiculous leap of logic.
No, not so much. I'm not sure who you are quoting "would have" from. I'm not talking about what they "would have" anything. My argument stems from what is written. Further, The Constitution is not some document that sits isolated from understanding the intent of its authors. We have plenty of evidence, from the minutes of the Continental Congress, from the early drafts of the document, and from other writings from the framers themselves. We can draw on all these things in our attempt to more perfectly inter
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Instead, it says "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union...", which you aren't a part of if you are not a citizen.
Stop right there, coward. Says who? Did you just make that up off the top of your head? Ignorance, indeed.
Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score:5, Informative)
It's a fallacy to state that the rights outlined in the Constitution (particularly the Bill of Rights) are granted only to citizens. The Constitution makes distinctions between "citizens" and "persons" all over the place. When the Constitution refers to "persons" or "people" (as it does in the fourth amendment), it is referring to ALL people, citizen or not. The founders believed in the concept of inalienable rights, which are rights granted to all people (or at least all white males in their day) by their Creator. The purpose of enumerating some of the more important of those rights in the Constitution was not to grant them, but to prevent the government from infringing on them.
How much the government has infringed on them anyway is, of course, a matter of much debate.
Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score:4, Informative)
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
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The Fourth Amendment has long been held to apply to all people under US jurisdiction, whether citizens or not. However, as stated by another reply to your post, the Supreme Court has ruled, rightly or wrongly, that it does not apply to border searches. So, by current law, the government is within its rights to search you at the border regardless of your citizenship status. It's a fallacy to state that the rights outlined in the Constitution (particularly the Bill of Rights) are granted only to citizens. The Constitution makes distinctions between "citizens" and "persons" all over the place. When the Constitution refers to "persons" or "people" (as it does in the fourth amendment), it is referring to ALL people, citizen or not. The founders believed in the concept of inalienable rights, which are rights granted to all people (or at least all white males in their day) by their Creator. The purpose of enumerating some of the more important of those rights in the Constitution was not to grant them, but to prevent the government from infringing on them.
Isn't it amazing that 218 years later even "activist judges" would consider the constitution a radical document with respect to "inalienable rights"? I fear that reflects more on the current society than on the wisdom of the founding fathers.
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(emphasis mine)
You don't honestly think that, do you?
I think you meant "you are free not to come here in the first place".
Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't the same privacy logic apply even more to your laptops and personal electronic devices when you're entering U.S. borders? Having these people search your hard drive is an invasion of privacy.
The logic has never applied when entering U.S. borders (or any other country for that matter). Searches that would be disallowed within the country have been ruled by the Supreme Court as allowed since the founding of the country. The people who wrote the Fourth Amendment did not question such border searches, which makes it hard to argue today that the Fourth Amendment was intended to apply.
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Speak for yourself.
I accept that it claims power for governing bodies who have men with guns. I am afraid of those thugs with their guns.
That is the entire extent to which I accept the constitution. I never signed it, I see no egitimate authority in it, or in the thugs with their guns, or the white haired old men who prattle about on topics that they know little about, who give them their orders.
-Steve
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Your right, and its sad but true.
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There's a reason why millions of people around the world still risk life and limb to try and come here and it's not because of American Idol.
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What does their intent matter?
The only thing that gives the Constitution any power at all is our collective acceptance of it.
Intent is vitally important. If we interpret the Constitution according to the whim of the moment, we no longer have Rule of Law. Once we lose Rule of Law, the whole system breaks down.Part of the purpose of the Constitution is to prevent the majority from abusing the minority (Yes, I know about the clause you mentioned, but that was a special case codifying an abuse that was already in place).
For instance, the founders also intended that only landowning men could vote and that humans could be property (perhaps not universally, but they did all sign that document).
Yes and later the American people decided that that was bad and changed the Constitution according to the procedure
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it lists a bunch of things that the government it authorizes is not supposed to do.
Actually, it was originally an exhaustive list of the things the government can do, but since neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are happy with the idea of a small, weak federal government, they have both been doing their best to convince everyone the opposite.
The constitution, as amended, lists exactly three ways the government can take your stuff: they can tax it from you, they can use a warrant (or a "reasonable" cr
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being searched at any border crossing in almost any country is normal. if you want to enter a country you have to agree to a search if they ask. same applies in the free loving europe as well. when i was in the military and we would return to the US after a deployment, they would take every 10th person and tear apart their stuff looking for contraband.
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Shouldn't the same privacy logic apply even more to your laptops and personal electronic devices when you're entering U.S. borders? Having these people search your hard drive is an invasion of privacy.
Not really - at least not for US citizens, IMHO. Non-citizens are requesting to enter the country, a prerequisite to such permission is to search items being brought in. You should be able to refuse a search and leave on the next flight; entrance is a not a right. It's the same traveling to any country; you either meet their entrance requirements or don't enter.
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Not that I'm agreeing with the laptop searches, but borders are funny places and the usual rules don't always apply. Customs officials can already search your belongings and/or your person(including rather invasive search procedures) with very little cause and certainly without a warrant. If they couldn't they couldn't do their jobs. To use the example from the summary, if you walk through customs with your locked briefcase you're expected to open it if they ask you. If it contained your confidential medica
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My hard drive is full of what appears to be random data. Search away.
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I don't think the two can be joined in the way your logic presents. The US uses the aegis of terrorism for many of its searches, and I'll use the example of vacuuming NAP points with filters, monitoring most all cell calls in the world, and using spy sattelites to look at naked people on beaches.
Google itself performs searches, ostensibly to the point of robot.txt, but I'm guessing it goes beyond that sometimes, it just doesn't produce public results to queries. Any spider/crawler app with sufficient muscle
It's very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want your data to be safe,especially when you plan to store it online in this new-fangled cloud thing, then encrypt it. You can't trust a service provider to stand up to a government access order, and you can't rely on the security of a storage system that you didn't make yourself.
Be responsible for your own data privacy instead of relying on an ambiguous interpretation of an ammendment written before the days of digital data.
Re:It's very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Like cracking the encryption will take long.
Using good encryption means the task is virtually impossible (even for someone like the NSA) unless they make a lucky guess or obtain the code key (via theft or subpoena).
Re:It's very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
http://xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com]
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So what? The point is that if tons of people carry encrypted business laptops over the border, there's no particular reason to check or flag or beat the password out of you with a wrench. There's too much presumption here that a government being nasty wouldn't target you just for using encryption and staying off the radar, and steganography also involves having lots of random data that seems very unrandom to have. The only good hiding place is to blend in with the masses, which is a lot easier if the masses
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Of encryption and the 4th ammendment, t
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Banning encryption falls afoul of the First Amendment, and possibly the Second (depending on whether strong crypto is still considered a munition).
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Yes, good encryption can protect your data from brute force attacks, but ultimately, the government can stop you from encrypting your data at all with an act requiring data not be encrypted.
If that ever turns out to the case, then government can do a lot more to you than merely ban encryption. As the cartoon in the other reply noted, they can just beat any passwords out of you.
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Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Re:Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud. (Score:5, Funny)
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"Otherwise you'll not be utilising the future-thinking operational motivators of time-shift market deployments, and that can seriously anti-creationalise your interstabularistic practicalularisation performocarbunkle cheesewozzles."
Won't someone please think of the cheesewozzles!
Hosting countries (Score:5, Insightful)
And if the data center is in another country, would the 4th Amendment apply there?
If so, how would you enforce it? Soldiers with machine guns show up, grab all of your data, crack the encryption, and take what they want. And you'll do exactly what?
The data is gone and seen, so you're screwed. And even if you have super duper one hundred billion bit encryption, your data center and data are gone. So, you have up to the second back-ups?
Other than cost, I see no upside to cloud computing.
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Or any law on the Internet, for that matter. I'm in the UK but the servers I rent are in the US, so I'm aware that the American government may have no qualms at all about implementing their (stupid or otherwise) legislation on my site and it is reasonable enough, since that is where the server sits.
The problem comes if I had a server in the UK and they try the same thing - they'll sure as hell feel that they have a right to enforce their laws (because it is relevant to an American citizen, damnit) but if my
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That is really nowhere near as easy as you make it sound, at least not with any modern cipher. Even the NSA, with the most vast computing resources in the entire world, would have a lot of difficulty cracking AES or Serpent, barring some completely novel attack that has eluded the crypto research community thus far.
If you want to break someone's crypto, you should not even think about attacking it directly. You should think about attacking the person, or at least planting recor
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Like all businesses keeping costs down helps them keep profits up and since Cloud Computing IS largely sold as a low-cost solution (we can discuss price vs. cost later) we know that keep
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And that is a potentially serious issue for people storing confidential and/or mission-critical data in the cloud. Especially when they thought they were storing it with a domestic provider, only to discover later perhaps that their data was actually shipped off to a 3rd party in another part of the world.
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Some reading for you [wikipedia.org]. Just because the AC doesn't want his data in the US doesn't mean he'd be happy with it being in China either, or that that is his only alternative.
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ANY country other than your home country exposes your data to laws and risks that are likely unfamiliar to you. At least at home you know what you're dealing with.
And I'd suggest that the U.S., while far from blameless (hence the thread) is actually one of the better ones. At least the government here is at least sort of transparent. In some countries they don't
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EC2 (Small) * 720h == $61.2.
That's not even factoring in bandwidth or storage (I currently have 80GB of storage and 500GB of monthly bandwidth), which add another $16 bucks to the total based on my current actual usage.
Now add in IO request charges, and a high-traffic website could easily outpace dedicated host
The Fourth Amendment became a quaint notion (Score:4, Insightful)
at the point when urine drug testing was mandated by the government for any company receiving government contracts. You know back in the days of Ronnie Raygun and the "Just Say No" crusades?
If you aren't secure against government searches OF YOUR OWN BODILY FLUIDS, do you really think that they will respect your right of privacy regarding some random 1s and 0s stored on a private corporation's computers somewhere?
I have no problem testing my pee (Score:4, Funny)
They can also just ask me. The answer is "If you haven't brought me some black coffee and dry toast in 5 minutes, I'm barfing on your shoes."
4th Amendment and progress (Score:2)
Wasn't it a core value of the Internet that it was abstracted above limitations of juridical boundaries, political division and secular belief systems to provide redundant fail-safe communication world wide enabling human progress in the face of systemic failed governance?
How does advocating _for_ juridical application of the 4th virutally annexing "the cloud" as the 51st state... tell me again how that abstracts the medium above the landscape.
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In reality the Chinese government actively restricts (or at least tries to) what passes into and out of their country by land, sea, air and cyberspace. Other countries have intervened on the Internet as
Part of the problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
The US constitutional amendment forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures is well settled in regard to the physical world
Electrons in computers ARE part of the physical world.
Stop conceding that is it different!
IT'S NOT!
its different philosophically (Score:2)
and therefore, it makes sense that it is also different legally
moving bits around is completely unlike moving pieces of paper around, in all sorts of fundamentally significant ways, with all sort of implications and ramifications for how society does work, could work, and should work
#1: i have a piece of paper on my desk (Score:2)
100 people around the world want that piece of paper
this will involve copying and mailing that paper, a lengthy task. it is indeed, protected, because it is a time consuming and expensive. therefore, there are natural hurdles to sharing this information, which means that publishing, or, the large scale movement of media, is the domain of a few rich players. laws governing their behavior can easily be enforced, mainly gentleman's agreements in the club house. a closet holding cd duplicators or a warehouse ho
Dumb idea anyhow. (Score:5, Insightful)
[T]he service provider has a copy of the keys to a user's cloud 'storage unit'
Why the hell would I want to give a copy of the keys to the service provider?
Just because you use the cloud to store bits of data doesn't mean that you'd want to store unencrypted bits of data there. Those that do risk distribution of your unencrypted data via a multitude of channels, including but certainly not limited to:
Why would anyone hand the keys to all their important data to a 3rd party that they don't personally know? Just because they're under a contract with that 3rd party? A contract drawn up exclusively by that 3rd party? With clauses designed to exclusively to protect that 3rd party?
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Seriously, if you are going to do something important in the cloud, get data storage from a different cloud than the one you use for processing.
Even better, have the data only exist in an unencrypted form while it is in use on the zero-storage processing cloud and run the keyserver in a third location. Preferably somewhere you'd notice when the cops break the door.
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And if something goes wrong in my 3-headed cloud won't each provider just point at one (or both) of the other two and claim it's their problem?
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Why would anyone hand the keys to all their important data to an employee they don't personally know? Why do you assume that your data will be perfectly safe as long as the people with access to it are direct employees rather than employees of a contractor?
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Every additional contractor, sub-contractor, sub-sub-contractor means more hands and eyes with access to my data
The 4th amendment grants government. (Score:2, Informative)
It is worth noting that under the Constitution, there is no federal power to search or seize, at all. Thus people who say that the 4th amendment doesn't list something as protected, like a computer file, miss that point. The 4th amendment is that the government is allowed to search mail, with a warrant, and nothing else.
Re:The 4th amendment grants government. (Score:5, Informative)
The last bit seems to list a set of preconditions which, if met, do allow it.
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The last bit seems to list a set of preconditions which, if met, do allow it.
Read this, and then you will see.
http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Letters-Correspondence-Between-Jefferson/dp/039303691X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263914845&sr=8-3 [amazon.com]
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It's very interesting to read correspondence between the Framers - but the fact is, only the actual text applies. And the actual text says that a warrant allows governmental search and seizure.
Uh not so fast. (Score:2, Insightful)
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But then again (Score:2)
If you know anything at all about security, you won't let your data be stored on someone else's computers and travel on someone else's network in the first place. (Spoken in the voice of Fat Tony [wikipedia.org]) Off-site storage is absolutely necessary, but there are other, more expensive, more tedious, but far more secure methods of keeping your data off site. And please don't keep a paper trail.
Only in america (Score:3, Insightful)
Specifically, would it be wise to assume that all, or any, backups will only be taken in america, or that the data won't get routed to or through another country.?
It's a big world out there and the USA is only a small part of it.
This was addressed by the Stored Communications Ac (Score:2)
t, way back in 1986.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act
"With respect to the government’s ability to compel disclosure, the most significant distinction made by the SCA is between communications held in electronic communications services, which require a search warrant and probable cause, and those in remote computing services, which require only a subpoena or court order, with prior notice. This lower level of protection is essentially the same as would be provided by the Fourth Ame
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Rather... no warrant is needed for cloud computing services, which I'd say is the very definition of a remote computing service.
Re:This was addressed by the Stored Communications (Score:2)
Well that's actually a fairly slim difference.
Generally speaking, if you can get a court order, you can get a warrant. It's not like the damned things are hard to get.
Stop insult people's intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear lawmakers, please make laws about cryptography, not about analogies of cryptography if you don't want me to just be an analogy of a law abiding citizen.
Thanks.
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Lawyers don't do that because they think you're dumb...they do it as a way to build out existing precedent. If there already is law or precedent covering sealed envelopes, for example, and you can show that the situation you're looking at is functionally the same as a sealed envelope, then you can argue that existing precedent covers the situation and no new law is necessary. Creating new precedent and/or law is rare, and judges are hesitant to do it unless there's a clear need. If the lawyers can presen
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folks (Score:2)
if you want something private, don't put it on the internet
if you want a private conversation, walk with the person on a beach
everything else is subject to snooping, and not just by the government. there are other less savory entities out there that can pilfer your information
so if its important, just keep it off the wires. this is a complete shortcircuiting of all of the legal arguments
because even if you successfully clamped down on the government across all legal avenues, the government really is the lea
Is the expectation of privacy legal? (Score:2)
The analogy of a locked briefcase is instructive. If the government were to try to guess the combination, aren't they ignoring my intention of privacy? That is, I locked the briefcase, intending to shield the contents from disclosure without my consent. Being a combination lock means nothing, because picking a key lock is the same effort, indeed snipping off the lock is the equivalent. Does the means of entry matter? Indeed, coercing me to divulge the combination, or give them the key, aren't these also
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Well, it is important to carefully describe our expectations and grievances with our government.
Reining in the railroads may have been a good and proper thing - they were using the commons, that is rights of way, to profit unfairly. But I see both sides. If our government is working to ensure freer markets, this is good. Sadly, they get it wrong a lot.
Telling you how much you must pay your employees over-simplifies the issue. The government tells you you must pay at least *this* much. If you're in the
don't give anyone else the key (Score:2)
Solution: just don't give anyone else the key to your encrypted data. And certainly not the third-parties.
The problem is, though, that web-browsers don't (yet) have good support for encryption/decryption of data.
The only encryption supported well is the TLS connection to the webserver, but that one doesn't count since it merely allows you to talk to the webserver (i.e., the third-party).
Another problem with client-side-encryption is that the third-parties cannot manipulate or index your data, but that could
Two intermixed issues (Score:2)
First issue - 4th Amendment protections in the US - what search and seizure protections do you have. Despite the so-called newness of the cloud (some of us remember big iron - dumb terminal models from way back) it is another way to electronically transmit information - so it would seem that all the existing wiretap laws would apply. Just like they can tap your phone they can intercept other electronic transmission, with a proper warrant. To the extent such information is publicly available (such as via a
The Cloud (Score:2)
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If their data is stored in another country, I'm not sure the U.S. could get that info without permission of another government.
Or another more important question:
What if the US engages in a data sharing exchange with another government. You show us your database, and we will show you ours.
Suddenly you have the UK monitoring US citizens w/o 4th amendment protections, and you have the US monitoring UK citizens without their privacy protections and then they exchange the data.
Somewhere along the line, Rights
The 1st rule of email should also apply to cloud (Score:2)
To be a pedant (Score:2)
But that's just pe
Reciprocity (Score:2)
My issue is reciprocity: If it is legal for the government to "peer into" my private data they should not be allowed to take umberage if I peer into theirs. (note: this is a joke do not put me in jail)
If privacy is dead it should be dead for *everyone*.
If privacy is not dead then it should be enforced for everyone.
Donate to the EFF (Score:2)
My bank does not have keys (Score:2)
to my safety deposit box. There are 2 keys to open the box. The bank inserts their key and I insert mine
in order to open the box. If I lose mine, they have made it very clear that it will cost me a couple of hundred
bucks for them to drill open the lock and re-key it. I think they will also drill it open under a subpoena. But
I will know next time I go to open it...
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Yes, in the US this is a standard practice. No financial institution I know of will keep a spare key to a safe deposit box. (The exception being those institutions which have switched to electronic locks, that technology doesn't easily allow for an institution to lock themselves out intentionally.)
That second key the bank possesses is known as a guard key. It's there to prevent what banks call "box hopping/jumping" where you sign-in on one box, and use a separate key to access another box unaudited. (eg if
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