Google Backs Yahoo In Privacy Fight With DoJ 173
PatPending sends in CNET coverage of Yahoo's new allies in its fight with the DoJ to protect the privacy of its customers' email stored in the cloud. Google, the EFF, the CDT, and others have filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the DoJ should be required to obtain a search warrant signed by a judge in order to compel Yahoo to turn over users' email messages. "Does email stored in the cloud have the same level of protection as the same information stored by a person at home? No, according to the Obama administration's Assistant US Attorney Pegeen Rhyne, who wrote in a government motion filed last month, 'Previously opened e-mail is not in "electronic storage." This court should therefore require Yahoo to comply with the order and produce the specified communications in the targeted accounts.' (The Justice Department's position is that what's known as a 2703(d) order — not as privacy-protective as the rules for search warrants — should let police read email.)" Update: 04/16 23:26 GMT by KD : he government backed off: "Saying the contested e-mail 'would not be helpful to the government’s investigation,' the authorities withdrew demands for e-mail in a pending and sealed criminal case." So no court ruling and no precedent.
Re:4th Amendment (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly. If the framers had meant to include the internet in the 4th amendment it would have been worded along the lines of: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, series of tubes, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.....
The Cloud is perfectly secure. (Score:0, 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:Privacy (Score:3, Funny)
your sig makes me hate you as a person.