Techlines Today

Threat of US spooks haunt Google

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 25, 2008 ⋅ Tags: google, government, laws, patriot act, privacy, security

It wasn’t too long ago that Google put it’s full attention towards cloud-computing, targeting businesses and universities to utilize Gmail and other Google Apps as their  core infrastructure. Eighteen months ago, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario Canada did just that - saving millions and months up front and hundreds of thousands in annual operating costs. The caveat, professors were instructed to not transmit private data over the wire.

The Globe and Mail has an article regarding the US Patriot Act and it’s direct effects on Google and cloud-computing in general. According to the article, organizations are beginning to ban Google’s services to avoid the potential of the US government browsing through the data - a convenience of the Patriot Act and "a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures."

Here’s the thing, feel free to get all worked up in a tizzy over Google but the real problem is the Internet backbone providers, who, save for Qwest, have no qualms in opening their networks to the US government security agencies. Once again, Google at least had the gumption to fight a public legal battle over releasing even sanitized data to the Feds.

The overriding point of the article may be the danger to organizations when they bring external companies inside the firewall, but refusing to trust Google is a rather ridiculous place to start enforcing data integrity in my mind. No one would argue that the greatest threat to corporate data leaks is from the employees themselves - knowingly or not. It may help us sleep at night on the thought that data protection is so advanced and thorough within your organization that the potential threat posed by Google (or others) is the main concern, but that’s just lunacy to me.

So is this the beginning of the end for the US’s Internet dominance? The war over privacy in the US was fought since 9/11 and we all lost. Rightly or wrongly, no information is out of reach of any US government agency should they so desire. Laws are in place now that ensure our old sense of privacy can never be restored. I can’t blame other nations for being concerned but their privacy days are numbered as well.

Just ask this guy!

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