Kia's World

Another interesting article by Bill Thompson for the BBC:

Please read the whole article on the BBC site, but some interesting extracts are:

"The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection.

Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.

If your data hosting company gets a National Security Letter then not only do they have to hand over the information, they are forbidden from telling you or anyone else - apart from their lawyer - about it.

The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, more than 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list."

And:

"This is not just a US issue, of course, although attention has focused on the US because that it where most of the cloud data centres can be found. It applies just as much to the UK, where the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will allow the police or secret services to demand access to databases and servers. And other countries may lack even the thin veneer of democratic oversight that the USA and UK offer to the surveillance activities of their intelligence agencies."

It is worth thinking - how much of your data is stored on servers in the UK & US? and not just data you have put there, such as emails, but also data held by other people - store cards, bank details, credit records - all are there to be used & abused. Once again - ENCRYPTION!!!