

Our Google Government - elcron
http://philosecurity.org/2009/12/24/our-google-government

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natrius
This seems very ridiculous. Google hosting government services, especially at
the typically non-confidential city/state level, is _less of an issue_ than
hosting services for private companies. Almost everything those governments do
is supposed to be open to the public. There is nothing (or at the most, very
little) to compromise.

Any organization, public or private, should be backing up their Google-
provided services on their own.

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mschwar99
I totally agree with your overall conclusion that the article is silly
alarmist. However, even government bodies that don't deal with "secret"
information house lots of "sensitive" data whose public release would be a big
deal. Departments / agencies have lots of confidential and proprietary
business information of the private companies they regulate and most agencies
have truckloads of personal data belonging to their constituents.

To say that Google Apps, etc is a new and unique threat to it is silly though.
At this point between contractors and private infrastructure providers there
is little or no government data that is handled only by government employees.

edit: Also, on the federal level one of the big pushes of the new CTO is for
GSA to build out its own "cloud" of datacenters with which to host
applications and house data for the rest of the executive agencies. While the
government might well hire could services from private companies, the goal is
to warehouse data inside a government controlled environment.

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JulianMorrison
Why suppose that p(in-house sysadmin gets sticky fingers) < p(Google sysadmin
gets sticky fingers)?

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Elepsis
It's worth keeping in mind that when Google proudly proclaims, "hey, so and so
many people have gone Google," they've chosen their definition very carefully:

"The reference to Going Google refers to US state governments using _one or
more_ of Google’s enterprise products..."

Let's not forget that Google's enterprise products include their search
appliances, Google Earth (to some extent), etc. This isn't by any means saying
that upwards of 50 percent of state governments are using Google Docs.

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Volscio
Good data in the post on Google (people are definitely more wary of them now
that they announce more and more projects in more and more areas of internet
architecture), but small fries compared to the military contractor complex's
influence on the federal government, in northern Virginia and Maryland...

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sjs
I'm pretty sure the US gov't could "persuade" Google to hand data over if it
really came down to it.

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comster
I think MS posted this.

