Dual US/Polish citizen here. Just wanted to say that in many cases abroad (i.e. Poland) the case isn't about the laws protecting your privacy but rather about the Government having no means (technical, resources, know-how, etc) to enforce ridicolous things like reading and storing email contents of all the people. Even with court order just to read stuff in your inbox, I would imagine that the Polish police would have big time difficulties doing anything. These are guys making 700usd a month and the Government doesn't have money and/or the need/desire to hire folks who could execute these things. And I can just imagine that in places like Ukraine the law may say whatever but what happens is this what the highest bidder asked for ;-) Remember, not the whole world works the way the first world or the USA does.
Unless of course, what you referred to is that most of the traffic goes via the US soil anyway. But then again, why to stay in the US? Move whole business and yourself abroad :-)) Ironically, I found much, much, much more freedom in post communistic Poland than - oh irony! - Land of the Free.
I second to that. If you want security (at least on a servers/ISP level) choose some 3rd world country which government (preferably not very fond of USA) does not have technical means on surveillance. I live in a small EU country and government’s IT forces are just laughable, so I can just imagine that in less civilised countries it should be close to non-existent. Combined with strong encryption to protect data in broad Internet it should do, at least for a while..
I understand what you mean but I think the term '3rd world country' could be a bit discouraging to some of our American friends who might not have a clear picture about realities in our part of the world.
For example I also live in a small EU country. By no means this is a 3rd world country - we have pretty strong IT industry (e.g. some globally successful antivirus companies etc.) and the country is certainly developed enough to host companies providing SAAS. Yet we have certain advantages against the US:
1. our government is way weaker than the US government - their resources are obviously not even close and they would not be able to do what US government does even if they wanted to. But we are still an EU state and we can use EU as a shield when Americans come knocking.
2. it is a post-communist country and people still remember the experience of living in totalitarian/authoritarian country. Opposition against any sign of 'bad old times coming back' seem to be much stronger than the opposition of common American people against recent freedom-stripping. For example there was a proposal that our internet providers should be required to block un-licensed online gambling. The public backslash against 'censorship' was so big that the plan had to be abandoned in few days and the politician who proposed it had to apologize. Many things that are now normal in US or UK and some other western countries would not be possible here.
3. we are still an 'American ally' but the US are not nearly as popular with common people as they used to be here and anti-Americanism seem to be growing. Many politicians exploit that and see opposing to American requests as an easy way to score political points (we have seen this for example when US government wanted to build a part of their missile defence system here).
Hah, good point. I bet most of Americans (no offence here) imagine that "3rd world" means "people still live in caves and hunts wild animals for food". However, a very good counter example is Skype which went worldwide even though started in a small, 3rd world country known as Estonia.
Are you czech by any chance ? I think it's a great place and completely understand why your people would be against government surveillance. The days of asking random people for IDs just to make sure they aren't spies still aren't forgotten there.
Yep. And thanks. And to be honest, I think that asking random people for IDs was the smallest thing. People from always-free countries do not realize how much authoritarian regimes damage society. It's not just that some people became victims of the regime. Maybe the worst thing (at least in my opinion) is that society in an authoritarian regime is set in such ways that the system rewards dishonesty and cowardice and the most unscrupulous people get to the top... and stay there even after the regime falls.
This is only because our mobile market is so small that we only have 3 providers and they are all subsidiaries of global companies (O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone) with headquarters under different jurisdictions. This is not enforced by our government and if anyone wanted to circumvent this filter (which would be easy - VPN would do) AFAIK it would not be illegal here.
Some countries have a problem with bribery and corruption. Routing sensitive data through those countries risks that data being exposed by anyone in the chain who is willing to take a bribe.
I am much more worried by corrupt workers in my ISP or telephony provider than I am about my government.
That's an issue with plain text data. However, nowadays absolutely no sensitive data should be transferred/stored unencrypted. The problem is, that it seems like eavesdropping is not enough for some certain governments and now they require physical access / backdoors to companies' servers in order to bypass encryption and/or other security means. What I, and few others have suggested is to move services away from such countries so their governments would have harder times to obtain physical access.
> The problem is, that it seems like eavesdropping is not enough for some certain governments and now they require physical access / backdoors to companies' servers in order to bypass encryption and/or other security means. What I, and few others have suggested is to move services away from such countries so their governments would have harder times to obtain physical access.
Many governments are much worse than the US; they not only snoop on data but they imprison or kill people as a result of the things they find.
I'd be interested to hear about countries who will i) stand up against the US & ii) not be at large risk of corrupt employees.
The problem is that most 3rd world countries will just come knocking on your doors and take everything away, if the US goverment requests it.
After all, those countries wouldn't be 3rd world countries, if they had the power to resist US threats/requests.
Or they are part of the "axis of evil" (or whatever the current propaganda term is), in which case the internet connection to that country could either be cut off, or be heavily censored, if it isn't already happening.
I would imagine that for example in Ukraine US may request stuff, but then the low level chief of the Police in the town where you reside would give you a hint in exchange for money. That's how it rolls there. What US is going to do about that? Bribe the Ukrainian police to bring you to their Embassy? ;-)
That's a good point but don't assume that the CIA/US-govt is above bribing or even threatening/blackmailing agencies in foreign countries. They do this all the time!
Unless of course, what you referred to is that most of the traffic goes via the US soil anyway. But then again, why to stay in the US? Move whole business and yourself abroad :-)) Ironically, I found much, much, much more freedom in post communistic Poland than - oh irony! - Land of the Free.