
No Safe Harbor: How NSA Spying Undermined U.S. Tech and Europeans' Privacy - jdp23
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/europes-court-justice-nsa-surveilance
======
AdmiralAsshat
Good. Money talks more than moral outrage ever will, however justified. The
only way it will stop is if enough companies with money (read: tech companies)
tell the government that these policies are destroying their business and
hence damaging the US economy.

We base a great deal of our foreign policy on corporate interests anyway, the
obvious solution here is to make corporate interests overlap with our
righteous indignation at government snooping.

~~~
happyscrappy
All intelligence agencies of the West are working together, but you can't hate
the entire West, that would be stupid.

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tajen
I'm not yet grasping what it means. I'm a lone developer targetting a B2B
ecosystem made of 75% US, 15% EU. As far as I understand, the following
activities are now forbidden. If so, that's the strongest protectionism that
EU startups could ever dream of...

\- Emailing my EU customers using MailChimp,

\- Pasting my EU customer data in a Google Spreadsheet,

\- Using Google Analytics,

\- Hosting my services in AWS-US

Am I totally off?

~~~
outside1234
I think its worse than that - one interpretation is that you can't use AWS _at
all_ because it isn't wholly owned by an EU company.

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mschuster91
The real problem is that even if the US passes a law that EU citizen data is
out of reach for the NSA the "backdoor" known as GCHQ still exists.

Any form of true protection of EU citizen data requires throwing out the
Brits. I personally hope that we won't have to kick them out because they will
exit the EU out on their own for good.

~~~
happyscrappy
Removing every country whose intelligence service is cooperating with the US
would leave no EU at all, although that may come about anyway.

~~~
mschuster91
There's a difference in cooperation between US/UK and USUK/Rest-EU.

~~~
happyscrappy
Germany is littered with US military bases so I don't see how you think they
are not cooperating much.

~~~
mschuster91
FVEY is on the receiving end of the pipeline, Germany only gets fed what the
US wants to feed.

~~~
happyscrappy
The Fourteen Eyes consist of the Five Eyes plus Denmark, France, the
Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. According to a
document leaked by Edward Snowden, the Fourteen Eyes are officially known as
SIGINT Seniors Europe, or "SSEUR".

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razster
I wonder if Native American tribes are able to ignore government request? That
is whom I deal with each day.

------
mschuster91
@dang: holy crap, what is going on with this thread? 95 upvotes in 1h and it's
dropped to #14?

~~~
dang
When there's an ongoing major story, we downweight follow-up posts (ones that
don't contain significant new information) as quasi-dupes. Otherwise the front
page tends to fill up with copycat articles. This is the lesson we learned
from l'affaire Snowden.

Arguably it shouldn't be on the front page at all, since
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10337299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10337299)
is, and that's the thread the HN discussion crystallized around. Edit: and
then there's
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338904).
But I think that on the day the story broke, a few different angles are ok.

(p.s. I only saw this by accident. If you want to make sure that we see
something, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We can't read all the HN comments
but we do read all the emails.)

~~~
jdp23
Interesting that you don't see this post as containing significant new
information. The Business Insider article had only the briefest of mentions of
the NSA, and nothing about the political consequences, and doesn't have any
perspectives from US privacy and civil liberties organizations. The EFF
unsurprisingly gives more context on all of these aspects. So the net result
is a textbook example of Hacker News' "objective" policies penalizing
alternate perspectives.

~~~
dang
There's a fallacy here (what's its name? maybe just sample bias?) where you're
assuming that we've analyzed this as closely as you have, therefore must be
making as precise a judgment as you, therefore must have an opposite agenda to
you, therefore must have a hidden opposite agenda to you.

But that's not how HN moderation works. In reality it's probabilistic: all we
do all day is guess. There's no hope of reading every story closely and making
precise calls. Not even close!

If you'd do what other users (including other users who feel strongly about
mass surveillance) do—consider the tradeoffs and help clarify which stories
are best by HN's standards—you'll get better results than accusing us of
sinister silencing.

~~~
dwwoelfel
I don't think he's accusing you of anything sinister. To me, it sounds like
he's saying "here is the result of your policy". It's almost as if you're both
saying the same thing :).

~~~
jdp23
Indeed :)

~~~
dang
It still amazes me how easy it is to misread these things—invariably because
one has a pre-existing picture that the new data snaps into. Sorry for making
a wrong assumption.

