

Swedes say no to Google Apps for government use - rahoulb
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/13/swedes-say-no-to-google-apps-for-government-use/

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T-A
The last sentence in the article, "shows the need for more infrastructure
catering to the needs of smaller populations — say, for the European Union"
reminds me of a common US-centric misconception. Almost 500 million people
live in the European Union, 740 in Europe including non-EU states, vs 314 in
the US. A loss of trust in US-centric infrastructure could be an opportunity
for providers catering to the needs of _larger_ populations.

~~~
achughes
Except the policy discussion takes place in the country scale not the
territory scale.

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gonvaled
We are (in most of the world) in a very unbalanced situation. Most of the
state of the art technology is run by US companies. Thus the whole world
(actually, those using services provided by those companies - i.e. nearly
everybody) is being spied. US citizens and companies are also being spied, but
here comes the unbalance:

The US government can use that information for bad or good purposes. This
applies to information about US citizens and other citizens. It is easy to see
why the US government would use that information for good purposes (like say,
prevent a terror attack) for US citizens. (proably bad things will happen to
US citizens too, like imprisonments for political reasons)

But it is _very_ difficult to see why the US would do anything good for
foreign individuals / corporations (unless we accept that the US is the world
government, and has the interest of all of us in its heart, which is
ludicrous).

So here we are: a government taking advantage of the technology developed by
(mostly, but not only) US companies, to further a political agenda.

I expect global boycott of US based cloud providers. It does not make sense
anymore. This is a trust which can not regained, since we have seen the
tactics involve flat lying - even legislation to force companies to lie.

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peto123
You are right, but the newly revealed indices suggests that your personal data
are not collected primarily from the cloud providers after they arrived to the
destination (like the spy agency would enter the Gmail repository through a
backdoor and vacuum out all the data), rather, the whole (or most of) Internet
traffic is monitored on the main routers and everything collected. Only thing
which is not yet clear (at least to my knowledge), how much is this being done
outside of U.S.

From this perspective, boycotting US based cloud providers is probably a
reasonable thing to do, but it is not clear if this will results in less of
your personal data being collected, if you just switch the provider. For
example, I noticed it is now popular to switch from Gmail to other providers
like fastmail.fm - I'm really not sure if this would be helpful at all.

~~~
gonvaled
Sure, but:

a) nobody is doing this in the same scale as the US, and nobody has the means
to do it (except maybe China)

b) If I live in Sweden, and the Swedish government is snooping on me, I get
both the good and the bad of it. If the US is spying on me, I only get the
bad.

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m_eiman
They're also not allowed to use US-based spam/malware filtering could-style
services, since that also means that the emails are sent to places where
integrity can't be guaranteed.

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leoc
They'd be mad not to forbid this, given that there's apparently no legal
impediment to the US Government accessing non-citizen non-residents' Google
accounts for the purpose of industrial espionage or political dirty tricks.

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kzrdude
Sweden used to be self-sufficient enough to build their own cars, fighter jets
and submarines. Let's hope we can tackle computing for this century.

~~~
JanneVee
Last I checked Volvo is still building cars. The swedish Air Force most modern
plane is JAS Gripen
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen)
. The status on submarines is unknown to me though.

~~~
tresta
Swedish submarines are ok...

"Gotland managed to penetrate the defensive measures of Carrier Strike Group
Seven undetected and snap several pictures of the USS Ronald Reagan during the
December pre-deployment Joint Task Force Exercise 06-2 (JTFEX 06-2) in the
Pacific Ocean (probably in the California Operating Areas), effectively
"sinking" the aircraft carrier.[10] The exercise was conducted to evaluate the
effectiveness of the US Fleet against modern diesel-electric submarines, which
some have noted as severely lacking.[11][12]"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSwMS_Gotland_(1995)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSwMS_Gotland_\(1995\))

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maqr
I wonder if this is also why Google has a special "Apps for Government", to
not be included on the general public's servers.

~~~
leoc
It wouldn't make any difference though - as long as Google is running the
service, it can be reached by a FAA 702 request.

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Nux
This is common sense, not news..

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eitland
Disgree.

Do you live somewhere where common sense is common?

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vq
The PUL (swedish privacy law) restricting where and how you can store
information about citizens is quite famous (infamous?) among swedish
technologists. Which is not saying that you're wrong, I wouldn't expect non-
swedes to be familiar with it.

But still, isn't it sensible for the government to keep internal information
within the national borders?

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jrockway
What's stopping the NSA from installing beam splitters outside of the US? The
whole thing sounds like the anti-Japanese paranoia from the 1980s.

~~~
gonvaled
The NSA is not almighty. It has lots of resources, and the US can put lots of
pressure in lots of places, but there will always be places out of reach.
Thanks to whistle blowers we can get to know which places have fallen under US
power, and route around that.

We can safely assume the whole US is not safe, because _legislation_ forces
companies to comply (or go to jail). Outside the US, not so easy.

~~~
arethuza
The US has a nuclear submarine that was apparently modified to allow tapping
of undersea communications cables:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29)

