Pacific Standard reports: A few days ago the European Parliament’s Office of Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs released a notably pointed briefing paper arguing for Europe to stop trusting American Internet services. The briefing and the committee are the latest forum to suggest that European states create domestic cloud computing capacities to provide member states legal protection for NSA data surveillance. The report has the not-at-all-subtle title “The US National Security Agency Surveillance Programmes (PRISM) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Activities and Their Impact on EU Citizens’ Fundamental Rights.” Among the findings:
Prominent notices should be displayed by every US web site offering services in the EU to inform consent to collect data from EU citizens. The users should be made aware that the data may be subject to surveillance (under FISA 702) by the US government for any purpose which furthers US foreign policy.
The argument there being that people will have an incentive to find other websites to use. Particularly for e-commerce. Companies like Amazon, and U.S. airlines and ticketing agencies—Expedia and the like—won’t be pleased, and that in turn will create economic pressure to alter surveillance strategy, the report argues.
A consent requirement will raise EU citizen awareness and favour growth of services solely within EU jurisdiction. This will thus have economic impact on US business and increase pressure on the US government to reach a settlement.
That isn’t all. The report argues for the European Union to simply swear off U.S.-based cloud computing, and to develop local capacity. [Continue reading…]
The “just trust us” language of both the NSA and GCHQ is yet another attempt to obfuscate the obvious.
The US and its North Atlantic vassal states no longer rule the world — and their governments have no one to blame but themselves. Greed drove them to push economic globalism on to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is now beating them at their own game.
So if they can’t rule geopolitical space anymore, they’ll rule cyberspace instead. Information is, after all, power, so hoovering up as much of it as possible and keeping it secret from all those “enemies” who have so recently earned the right to their fair share constitutes the West’s last, desperate attempt at global rule. And if that comes at the cost of the privacy and speech rights that gave the West the edge in the first place, so be it.
Anyone who doubts that the rest of the world is the “enemy” needs to read this:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/25/3650784/why-we-spy-on-brazil.html#.UkQ_vLcDknA.twitter