Researchers: PATRIOT Act Can 'Obtain' Data In Europe 133
An anonymous reader writes "U.S. law enforcement and intelligence services can use the PATRIOT Act/FISA to 'obtain' EU-stored data for snooping, mining and analysis, despite strong EU data and privacy laws, according to a recent research paper. One of the paper's authors, Axel Arnbak, said, 'Most cloud providers, and certainly the market leaders, fall within the U.S. jurisdiction either because they are U.S. companies or conduct systematic business in the U.S. In particular, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments (FISA) Act makes it easy for U.S. authorities to circumvent local government institutions and mandate direct and easy access to cloud data belonging to non-Americans living outside the U.S., with little or no transparency obligations for such practices -- not even the number of actual requests.' Arnback added, 'These laws, including the Patriot Act, apply as soon as a cloud service conducts systematic business in the United States. It's a widely held misconception that data actually has to be stored on servers physically located in the U.S.'"
Re:So what we learn from this is.... (Score:5, Informative)
In the Netherlands, we want to host our own data. Some want to build a national database for medical data. However, an American company is developing the software - so that might be enough for the Americans to demand access to whatever is put on that database.
So, essentially, when any US based company deals with another third party, all the data of this third party does is now declared property of the US.
This was front page news just a week ago. Not a really good advertisement for US based software developers. For the record, the project manager (who is Dutch) denies that the Americans would get access. And I guess that under the Patriot Act it is also illegal to claim that the US is snooping around. So, for the record, I deny writing this post, since this is hosted on an American server - or at least maintained by people who create American-centric polls.
Source in Dutch: http://www.metronieuws.nl/nieuws/beheerder-patientendossier-vreest-patriot-act-niet/IWIlkD!AQnwumcZSKxKeH8VP9BZwQ/ [metronieuws.nl]