

European Parliament Up In Arms Over PRISM - chrbutler
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/11/european_parliament_denounces_prism.html

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sentenza
As a someone from Europe (Germany), I can say that this whole affair is
definitely a public relations disaster for the US over here. In the beginning,
I was really unsure if regular people who are not members of the tech
community would become aware of this or if it was perceived as to much of a
niche topic.

Well, I guess that question has been answered: Yesterday tagesschau[1], the
biggest and most trusted evening television news show carried a short segment
about it. Today I read that Merkel herself wants to bring this up at her next
meeting with Obama.

[1]
[http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/sendung/ts42578.html](http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/sendung/ts42578.html)
at about 7:30

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danmaz74
It will be interesting to see the real effects though. How long will people
remember about this? How much will it affect their actual choices? The US
"brand" overcame so many scandals, I'm not sure this one will be different.

~~~
sentenza
You bring up an interesting point. I would describe the effect of revelations
of this kind on people in Germany as a noticeable jump in one direction on a
sentiment continuum, if that makes any sense.

The generation of currently 25 to 40 year olds here have grown up in an
extremely US-influenced cultural environment. Imagine that there is this
magically interesting and quite progressive place on earth and they broadcast
from there on all TV channels all the time. That's what it was like to grow up
in the 90s in Germany.

Having grown up with a generally positive view of the US, the Iraq war was a
decisive turning point for many people of that (i.e., my) generation. By the
time Colin Powell presented his case before the UN, many Germans started to
feel betrayed, because it seemed so obvious that an invasion was not the right
thing to do (the GOOD GUY became a mere mortal). Older people that were
familiar with the political games of the cold war might not have been
surprised, but the young people definitely were. Since then for many Germans,
the attitude towards the US is quite ambivalent. It is possible that this in
some situations leads to unfair highlighting of wrongdoing on part of the US,
but I'd say that by and large the effect is primarily that there is now
interest in good news and bad news about the US.

Add to that, that many Germans feel extremely uneasy about intelligence
gathering in general (think STASI), and you have a reason to assume that, at
least in Germany, this thing will linger in the hearts and minds for a while.

It has to be noted, however, that this also means that the reaction in Germany
cannot be generalized to the rest of Europe.

~~~
danmaz74
What you said could mostly be said about Italy too. Except for the STASI, of
course :)

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mbesto
It'll be interesting to see what happens to those global (US-based) cloud
providers whose business strategy of poor profit margins in exchange for
reduced costs of sale fair after this PR catastrophe. When it comes to the
economics of this, the US is going to lose a huge amount of business due to
this and potentially could in theory cause several businesses to go bankrupt.
Since, government's are naturally fiscally motivated, I suspect the real way
for Americans to complain is "with their wallets". In other words there is
definitely an argument to be had for "We can't compete in the world's
technology game because they don't trust our security. We can no longer
innovate because of the government's haphazardness. Fix this US government."
At least then when another terrorist attack happens in the US, the government
can say "Well, you wanted your economics, so we gave it to you, but now you
lack security. Pick one or the other."

This is going to be great for EU-based providers. They've been struggling for
awhile to compete with Amazon, Rackspace, etc. I'd bet my money today on
private, country-based cloud providers in EU. It will be nearly impossible for
the US to dig itself out of this one.

~~~
res0nat0r
I used to work for AWS and currently work for another large cloud computing
company, and the words NSA and PRISM haven't been mentioned once in any of our
companywide meetings this week.

I think the HN echo chamber is hyping this up more than the rest of the real
corporate world. Large companies who want to move to the cloud already know
the risks/rewards of hosting their data via offsite 3rd party companies. They
aren't worried about some threat that the NSA is sucking up all their data,
they are concerned about people breaking into their instances and stealing
their customer data.

~~~
freehunter
I work in information security for a large international corporation, and I
can add another anecdote to back up yours. We've discussed the news informally
as a curiosity, but there's no business drive to really do anything about it.
We're not trying to hide our business operations from the government, we're
trying to hide them from our competitors. You're absolutely correct that
businesses care about security from civilians more than security from
governments.

With that, the push won't happen unless our customers start demanding our
cloud-based solutions are free from government snooping. In my employer's
industry, I doubt that would happen. However, we have gained compliance with
many industry standards that we don't necessarily need to be complaint with
just because our customers demanded it. It's not the big businesses that will
be demanding a change, it's the customers of those businesses. If enough
customers care, things will change. If the customers don't care, then nothing
will be done.

~~~
danmaz74
Well, if you were a large enough non-US company, and you had large US
competitors - especially defense contractors - you would think differently.
You would think about Echelon and industrial espionage. But I expect those
kinds of companies not using foreign IT services already.

~~~
freehunter
That's a fair point. I don't work in the defense industry so that didn't cross
my mind. I suspect you're correct with all three sentences.

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Mordor
Ultimately the only language the US government understands is the massive
fines and restrictions about to be levied against its corporations. Should
Apple be operating in Europe for example? Would it be possible to levy a fine
for each iPhone sold? Perhaps the tax authorities could take a different view
on their profits...

~~~
ig1
In theory if someone knew they were subject to data being collected about them
they could bring a law-suit against the companies involved for breaching data
protection and privacy legislation.

The immunity that companies get from co-operating with the US government only
covers them in the US, not in other countries.

But in practice the only time people know this information is being collected
on them is when a company (i.e Twitter) refuses to comply with such an order.

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jsonne
Ironic as one of their member states (Sweden) has a potentially even more wide
reaching program.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law)

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tripa
AFAIK, Sweden doesn't host gmail or facebook servers.

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anon1385
Facebook does have servers in Sweden:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/31/facebook_swedish_dat...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/31/facebook_swedish_data_centre_privacy_law/)

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Zenst
AS somebody living in the EU I'm more shocked the EU Par-lament(sic) are
thinking this is new and ignoreing previous indications becasue not enough
people went rabble rabble. WIth that the Press has jumped on this, forcing the
consumer to be more up in arms as and fueling this to the extent that the EU
mob have to play knee jerk reaction and supprise.

Seriously wonder if we should sack the politicians in the EU and just replace
them with jornalists, as they seem to be more on the pulse of whats going on
and have more control of the people.

But as no EU contry can control it's TAX then who or what gets at leaked data
is no supprise.

Been enough details and facts leak out about this being in place before this
PRISIM leak, still will only hurst USA based cloud providers and that is the
only crux of it.

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runn1ng
They are probably angry that European Union doesn't have such a program, too.

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throwit1979
With the news out that UK and Dutch law enforcement have been fed data from
PRISM, I really don't think anyone should take this feigned outrage seriously.

~~~
jkn
Members of the European parliament are elected directly by the people, and
their mandate is only for work in the European parliament. Most of them have
no insider knowledge of what happens in the ministries of individual
countries.

To give some numbers: according to Wikipedia[1], about a third of MEPs have
previously held positions in country parliaments, and about 10% in country
ministries.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_of_the_European_Parliame...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_of_the_European_Parliament#Members.27_experience)

