Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply.
"I will never give up customer data" is a very tough promise to keep, if the government threatens you with your business license being revoked, your servers and domains being forcibly seized by the police, and you personally going to jail.
(Under the current US administration, we can add "A close examination of the immigration status of all foreign nationals employed by your company, followed by probable deportation or jail" to the list of potential consequences for resisting the government.)
The trick is to collect as little data as possible and to get rid of what you need to collect as quickly as you can. This is in direct opposition to the practices of companies like Microsoft which wants to spy on their users and profit from the data they collect though.
There's also an open question of how possible it is to run a system that doesn't collect/store data in a way that makes it possible to be collected by the government. The US government can force companies to compromise their systems or shut down their services if they refuse. In the past they've even threatened that shutting down a service instead of compromising it could still get operators in legal trouble.
At this point anyone who wants to keep the US government out of their data should avoid using any US company.
Signal used to never collect data on users, but they've changed that a while ago and now they keep user's name, photo, phone number, and a list of their contacts permanently in the cloud protected from the government by nothing except by a leaky enclave and a pin (https://web.archive.org/web/20250117232443/https://www.vice....)
More recently they've started collected the contents of messages into the cloud too, yet to this very day their privacy policy opens with the lie: "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." which hasn't been true for a very very long time. I consider their refusal to update their privacy policy to be a massive dead canary warning people that the service has already been compromised, but feel free to take your chances.
You're able to disable the pin feature to prevent that data from being saved though, so it definitely isn't a requirement.
I'm also not sure where you've read that they collect the contents of messages, because as far as I'm aware they still aren't doing that and I can't find any info online that indicates that they are (other than their secure backup feature that's opt-in only I suppose)
The fact that Signal users are still unaware of where their data is going and when should tell you all you need to know about how trustworthy the service is. Not being 100% clear about the risks people take when using software which is promoted for use by people whose freedom and/or lives depend on it being secure is a very bad look for Signal.
I don't have a good one sorry. I'm currently using silence for unsecured texting and jami for secure communication. Both are not something I'd recommend to regular people the way Signal used to be back when they let you get secure and insecure texts in one place.
Well this is especially significant because Microsoft is currently building a sovereign datacenter in France (nicknamed "Bleu"). I'm wondering what the consequence of that testimony will be.
> Not all countries have an equivalent to the USA CLOUD Act.
Not yet, anyway. Unfortunately, pretty much every country seems to be getting less and less open and free over time. Some are better than others, but it does feel like everyone is regrettably rowing in same direction.
Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply
Not according to both Amazon's and Microsoft's historic marketing materials. They have always claimed that data stored in your local jurisdiction is not accessible to law enforcement abroad. And the US judiciary initially agreed with that: https://petri.com/microsoft-wins-appeal-data-stored-abroad-s...
...which then led to the US CLOUD act and here we are, once again, proving that the past is alterable; just like Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Of course. But what if the holding lives in a country that don't enforce this (or is too weak to). Then all the subsidiaries are really sovereign from the host country perspective.
It seems the solution is ages old. Don't have the holding incorporated in an empire...
How would this work in practice? If the empire wants to get at your data, why do you think it would shy away from pressuring a country so weak that it can't afford to enforce this on their companies?
Then the empire just says that they want the data or you won't be allowed to operate in the empire, which would be bad for profits and anger shareholders.
That's not so. In a democratic state of law, the police can not unilaterally decide to seize you servers, and the politicians cannot tell the police to do so. Separation of powers is a thing.
I've never understood this take. A lot of people were saying this sort of thing when Proton Mail turned over some user data to authorities in Europe a while back.
If you're running a tech company and run afoul of the law in some or another jurisdiction, it doesn't matter how much spine you think you have. When a group of men with guns, i.e. the police, shows up at your door and gives you the option of turning over some customer data or spending the next 10 years of your life in a steel cage, I'm betting that practically no one is going to choose the cage, spine or not.
The only way to keep user data safe is to not collect it in the first place.
Specifically here, he is under oath in France so an American gag order wouldn't protect him from the French justice system.
This make it less likely he's lying. It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law. Then the boss can swear to the Senate that they're complying.
This is exactly the system the US Congress accused TikTok of having set up.
If the data center is operated by a "trusted subsidiary" as the article mentions and everyone in key roles is a French citizen with no connection to the US then there is no one to give a gag order.
In practice the US HQ could mandate a security update that secretly uploads all data to the US but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't think anyone is ready to open.
the data center which runs software written and controlled by the US companies and likely has a 24/7 software related support team which is distributed across the world....
in a modern cloud dater center you don't need someone physically plugging a USB stick in a server, you just need a back door in a cloud software stack many times the size then any modern operating system which often even involves custom firmware for very low level components and where the attacker has the capabilities to convince your CPU vendor to help them...
>In practice the US HQ could mandate a security update that secretly uploads all data to the US but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't think anyone is ready to open.
incredibly ambiguous/unsatisfying sentence. if this french hearing is concerned about french data security, then asking a question about your "in practice" is exactly a can of worms the french would like to open.
I understand the psychology and casual use of absolutely worded reactions, and that their extreme expression is not taken literally, but as emphasis. But I still prefer balanced wording.
A surprisingly large number of people tragically clash and talk past each other over charged non-issues, that normal undramatic language would render moot.
I.e. "We must believe all X", vs. "We should listen to all X", ... and many more.
"Black Lives Matter Too", isn't as pithy. Nor should the last word be necessary for anyone to understand the three word version. But the fourth word, nodding to the wider context, pre-counters a lot of ridiculous responses to the original line. Not actually suggesting a sea change in a well recognized movement banner line. But it is a widely observed example of how any lack of pedantic clarity is seized upon by motivated reactionaries, to achieve politically significant impact via obtuse reinterpretation.
A little verbal pedantry is an effective speed bump against the siren song of motivated or inadvertent polarization.
It's naive or foolish to think that the problem with "Black Lives Matter" was insufficient specificity.
People who are not operating in good faith won't operate in good faith. There were thousands of words written on the phenomenon protested by BLM, but those are easily ignored. Three words are twisted and co-opted by propagandists. Consider a function that describes "comprehension by bigots" as a function of word count. We know that 0 words yields 0 comprehension. Evidence suggests that 10k words also yields 0 comprehension. There is no evidence that this Laffer curve will ever achieve anything other than zero.
It's possible to reach and change bigots' minds, but it requires human connections. Not sloganeering, prose, or reels.
To the degree that pushback against anti-minority mistreatment can be framed as pro-universal (reciprocal) respect, I think it helps. Given the latter is in fact the real, most general, and most relevant principle.
That avoids the framing created and imposed by biases. I.e. that somehow, race or other category is the question, instead of (logically and morally) irrelevant to the value of reciprocal respect. Not forgetting the point of it all, avoids actual or perceived reverse biasing. Minority rights and equality being interpreted by either side as anti-majority, or being at the expense of anyone.
Some shrill minority defenders do manage to imply that, as well the people having trouble respecting some group.
This are just thoughts based on what I find works better in personal encounters with people I know or ran into, who had/have difficulty seeing the world without in-group, out-group filters of various kinds.
Keep the simple, general, most important thing clear and center.
Avoid letting the conversation be artificially narrowed by exactly the destructive framing we want to push back on. The narrower the framing the more people forget, ignore, and successfully distract from the main principle. The more people get bogged down in narrower and narrower arguments, the less people understand each other.
> This make it less likely he's lying. It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law. Then the boss can swear to the Senate that they're complying.
It's also possible that US employees had access to French servers without anyone in France knowing.
Until this happened MS was still going around trying to convince lawyers to use their Cloud and telling them that there is no issue.
Including certain contractual "standard"(1) agreements which would make some of their higher management _personally_ liable for undue data access even under Cloud act from the US!!!
(1) As in standard agreements for providers which store lawyer data, including highly sensitive details about ongoing cases etc.
So you can't really trust MS anymore at all, even if personal liability (e.g. lying under oath) is at stack. And the max ceiling for the penalties for lying under oath seem less then what you can run into in the previous mentioned case...
You also have to look a bit closer at what it even means if "the french MS CEO swears they are complying" it means he doesn't know about non compliance and did tell his employees to comply and hired someone to verify it etc.
But the US doesn't need the French CEO to know, they just need to gain access to the French/EU server through US employees, which given that most of the infra software is written in the US and international admin teams for 24/7 support is really not that hard...
And even if you want to sue the French CEO after a breach/he (hypothetically) lied he would just say he didn't because he also was lied too leading to an endless goose chase and "upsi" by now the French CEO somehow is living in the US.
And that is if you ever learn about it happening, but thanks to the US having pretty bad gag orders/secret court stuff the chance for that is very low.
So from my POV it looks like MS has knowingly and systematically lying and deceiving customer, including such with highly sensitive data, and EU governments about how "safe" the data is even if it lead to personal legal liabilities of management.
And I mind to remember that AWS was giving similar guarantees they most most likely can't hold, but I'm not fully sure. Idk. about Google.
Oh and if you hope that the whole Sovereign Cloud things will help, it wont. It's a huge mage pretend theater moving millions over millions into the hands of US cloud providers while not providing a realistic solutions to the problem it is supposed to solve and neglecting local competition which actually could make a difference, smh.
The max penalty for things like this is actually life inprisonment though. If you, to aid a foreign power without authorization gather certain types of information, it's espionage.
There wouldn't be any lawsuit. If you do this kind of things you get arrested, get a trial and then you are in prison forever.
except we are speaking about lying under oath, not espionage, you don't get a trail for espionage because you lie under oath
and leading management also technically doesn't need to know that is happens for it to be doable. Or in other words they have a lot of reason to "accidentally" not know about it/have it overlooked
this means even if it happens they are very unlikely to be charged for anything more then negligence
but the contracts I mentioned above basically state "it doesn't matter why it happens and if you knew or if it was your fault as long as there was the smallest bit of negligence on your side you are on the hook for it personally". So in a situation where they can effectively avoid espionage trials (because they didn't commit espionage, just negligence) they still are hold responsible
if high level management would reliable go to prison for things like that you wouldn't need additional contracts to make sure they actually have insensitive to actively try to find/prevent anything like this/act very non-negligent.
He wouldn't even be charged for lying under oath if he lied and it became apparent, because there'd be not considering the much more serious espionage charges. They'd only prosecute the espionage part.
Participating in a plot to supply french state information to the US is espionage. France also apparently has a broad definition of espionage, relative to some other EU countries.
States have a tendency of coming down rather harshly on this kind of thing, so this idea about negligence is I think unlikely. If you know about it the charges will be espionage charges. If it happened it would be the biggest thing ever. They'd arrest most Microsoft employees in relevant teams as well the leadership, probably many others too. Just interrogation would probably take half a year due to lack of interrogators.
Less likely doesn't say much though. He may have simply weighed the chances of the French government ever finding out that he lied.
> It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law.
I would think that is not just a possibility, but a certainty.
An inevitable consequence of this administration destroying US foreign influence and power at an unprecedented rate is that (IMHO) it is inevitable that the EU builds their own cloud and mandates its use for EU data. It is becoming a matter of national security.
The interesting thing is that the US is acting in the exact way that they accuse China of acting. Companies like Huawei are forbidden from installing telecom infrastructure for "national security" reasons [1]. One of justifications for first banning then forcing a sale of Tiktok was because of possible Chinese government interference. It's only a matter of time before the EU and China start making the same determination against US tech giants (eg Meta executive brags about silencing dissent [2]).
This administration really is killing the golden goose.
I don't think that YouTube video is a good supporting piece for your point. The spokesperson says they don't want to propagate harmful stereotypes. "brag about silencing dissent" seems like a strawman interpretation
A better faith interpretation is that people are free to criticize Israel and Zionism on Meta, just not using racist tropes.
Oh if that were only true. It's been made apparent in the last 2 years in particular that fighting antisemitism from the perspective of the ADL and figures like Jordana Cutler (who previously worked for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office) simply means silencing critcism of Israel, even when that means siding with actual antisemites (up to and including neo_nazis and outright Nazis). Examples:
- Ben Shapiro excuses antisemitic remarks by Ann Coulter because she's pro-Israel [1];
- ADL defends Elon Musk for making the Nazi salute (twice) on stage [2]
- We brutalized people with the police for organizing peaceful protests to say "maybe we shouldn't bomb children" or to get their respective universities to divest their endowments from the state doing the bombing;
- We went so far as trying to deport legal permanent residents for organizing said peaceful protests (ie Mahmoud Khalil); and
- The IHRA definition of antisemitism includes criticisms of the state of Israel.
I was replying to the claims on big tech company policies. Jordana Cutler appears to be an internal advocate for reducing antisemitism on the Meta platform. They don't set policy. There are many similar roles for many different groups, it's how the company tries to hear more points of view before making policy changes.
We can only judge big tech company policy based on its declaration or application. So far I see no supported criticisms of either, though I am open to them.
Meta is one of the worst for silencing ("downranking" or outright removing) pro-Palestinian content [1]. That's what Cutler is bragging about.
But it would be a mistake to single out Meta here. All these big tech companies move in lockstep with US foreign policy to appease the administration to get approvals for mergers, to end investigations and antitrust suits, to get government contracts and so on.
The separation is even in the URLs, all the locales are using paths, except the US, which lives under us.ovhcloud.com. All locales use a customer console hosted at ovh.com, except the US, which has it under us.ovhcloud.com.
You can't just spin up an LLC and call it a separate company. OVHCloud is still OVHCloud US' subsidiary company.
From the FAQ page I linked:
> In accordance with our Privacy Policy, OVHcloud will comply with lawful requests from public authorities. Under the CLOUD Act, that could include data stored outside of the United States. OVHcloud will consider the availability of legal mechanisms to quash or modify requests as permitted by the CLOUD Act.
I think we'll see a lot of companies moving away from public cloud providers in the future, but I don't think it'll be because of any privacy-related concerns.
It rarely makes economic sense to deploy workloads onto the public cloud unless you have critical uptime requirements or need massive elasticity.
FISA and the Stored Communications Act as modified by the CLOUD Act don't distinguish between (i) parent company overseas + US subsidiary and (ii) parent company in US + foreign subsidiary. In both instances the US asserts personal jurisdiction, extending to wherever the data is stored geographically.
The US by and large can (and does) assert authority outside of its jurisdiction, from which another country can choose to capitulate.
Most of the time countries do, because they are all swapping data on their citizens between themselves to skirt various laws.
In the case where the US really wants something, and the country won't yield, they'll fund contras or destabilize the government (if small enough to be bullied) or impose sanctions so drastic it's effectively a soft act of war.
This is all to say that, the US has nearly unlimited authority while it stands as the world's defacto superpower.
If the violent, untrustworthy, Americans choose to go to war with their former allies over some data then that's their choice. Better than just giving these warmongers everything they want.
It's all because of something that started years ago: the move to the cloud.
Companies started to move to cloud like there was no tomorrow.
Their on-prem products became maintenance or zombies.
Now you want the self hosted? Good luck.
What's the alternative for a SaaS provider? Support all the possible cloud alternatives? That's nearly impossible, so some companies (mainly big organizations) provide their software/SaaS in AWS gov regions and so be it.
(Or... be smart, see the trend and start selling your software again in self-hosted solutions!)
For a consumer (gov, for example) this means: you don't have that feature, you give in, or you build it/let it build (open source).
This is the only reason why we saw the recent announcement of the Austrian govt that was able to migrate from MS to Nextcloud. Without an alternative, ... they couldn't have done anything.
Well no, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and Tim Apple will come grovelling when they are called... that's all it takes.
If you do something that the EU doesn't like it's response will be relatively rational and proportional. While the US government is currently run by unpredictable and volatile people. So risk/reward wise it's rather obvious whose orders they will be following.
Yup. I always thought it was a way just to get business in EU. Do some performative dance of "hey, look! a separate DC building with EU employees only" and then hope nobody would ask too many questions.
Then the next level is regulators in EU also have to care and can't just say "ok, you have a separate DC building with EU employees only. Good. My job is done, I checked" and move on.
Governments are not exempt from Cloud Act and US providers can be under gag order, so from EU or UK government perspective, they will never know if data has been accessed by 3rd country and what happened to it.
This is actually amazing that all the tenders have not been rejected under national security grounds or simply security services (yet again) have not done the job tax payers pay them to do.
Pretty much yes. From Saas to authentication systems to OS to chips. The EU infra is entirely dependent on the US. All documents, emails, chat messages, and most forms of storage are directly or indirectly linked to an American service.
On top of that, the US can update it all remotely, including the hardware now thanks to things like intel ME.
Or at least have everything they need to develop such a capability. And it's not like the current people in power care much about alienating other countries.
> the US can update it all remotely, including the hardware now thanks to things like intel ME
Let's not be excessively alarmist; AFAIK, the Intel ME is not (unless you're using things like vPro) exposed directly to the network, you need the cooperation of the operating system to reach the ME.
Of course, said operating system is usually Microsoft Windows, which can be updated remotely... (and even Linux users often use USA-based distributions).
According to its specs, but since it's a black box for which we have neither the source nor the design documents, and given that implementing back doors is a regular request from governments, it's a logical concern.
> From Saas to authentication systems to OS to chips. The EU infra is entirely dependent on the US.
I would absolutely love to see the EU invest in developing processors and operating systems. It'd benefit us all to have real competition in those spaces, and it's the only way the EU can ever keep their data out of the hands of the US government.
Anyone who's read the law has known this for years.
The GDPR is incompatible with the Cloud Act, and so the only legal (or so it should be) way to use US companies is to treat them like unsafe third countries - no matter the data center location.
But everyone wants to continue like before. Having to ensure that Amazon and Azure never touches unincrypted personal data is hard. So one "compromise" after another has been tried - never solving the actual problem.
As a EU citizen I think it's entirely embarrassing. Either the EU should have the power to force European subsidiaries to be exempted from the cloud act, or everyone should be forced to abide the law, which would greatly boost EU tech. Instead we are just rolling over.
Microsoft tried architecting a "surveillance shelter" in Ireland. It worked. That's actually why the CLOUD Act even exists[0]: it was passed specifically to prohibit Microsoft from doing this.
I wouldn't think "sovereign" EU data would be protected from US snooping either, unless the Five Eyes Plus alliance is going to be dissolved. Even then...
I don't believe that's the case because the intelligence pooling is meant to remove cross-border friction. A general breakdown of western alliances would probably be required (and maybe that's where we're headed.)
"Plus" is key - Five Eyes Plus includes EU members France and Germany, at minimum. It's a comfortable informal relationship between Five Eyes and highly trusted nations that have almost joined Five Eyes in the past. France was closest to becoming the official sixth eye under Obama. Japan is another of these nations.
Might have Something to do with the current US administration tweeting pictures of confidential material in the past, exposing their capabilities to the world. Intelligence community members tend to hold their cards close to their chests.
I mean, do you see any actual moves they’ve made to move away from the US? I don’t. They always make a lot of noise about how this time they’re not going to take the depredations of the US before doing just that.
I'm flattered that you think that the intelligence agencies of the four other "eyes", Australia, Canada, New Zealand; would tell me their moves, or that I'd hear about it, but honestly, I'm not that important.
Seriously though, what are you expecting to hear? For the CSIS to post to Twitter what they're hiding from the CIA, as if the CIA hasn't heard of Twitter or something? Or for the GCSB to broadcast which billionaires are making bunkers in Hammer Springs to /r/secretbillionairebunkers like someone is wrong on WarThunder?
What I'm saying is the spooks of their respective countries are just gonna keep a bit more to themselves and not tell the US because the think someone in the current US administration is going to leak it, putting their assets at risk. The respective secret agencies haven't put out coordinated press releases saying they're doing this or gone on the talk show tour to talk about it, so I have no proof, but it seems quite possible to me that they are.
US cloud act is definitely an overreach. Suddenly private infrastructure is now an extension of the government surveillance complex. This is the equivalent of the govt being able to put a camera on your building because they want to observe the public/private area around it.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway, with my keys ? If the crypto is strong enough then surely cloud providers can’t do anything with it ?
> Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway
"Cloud" is not only for storage; it's also for compute. Doing compute directly on encrypted data (homomorphic encryption) is very slow and very complicated, so when using a cloud, the data is usually either unencrypted, or encrypted but the key is elsewhere in the same cloud.
I get that FHE is not realistic today, but can’t I use ( if it’s really critical) a combination of confidential vms and an external hsm ? I understand I’ll be limited to traditional workloads , and not managed services though.
I asked the wrong question, what I really meant was ‘if I run in a less trusted environment, am I not supposed to use all possible crypto mechanisms available to make that environment more trustworthy , so that I can’t be deceived by my cloud operator sending my data to the us government’
That's just not possible. It's why detractors never got on board with the Cloud. Until FHE is feasible, the decryption keys and plaintext have to exists in RAM eventually at some point in order even if only took be re-encrypted, if any complex work is to be done on it. Because eg, Amazon, has access to your hardware, there's simply no way to prevent them from reading your secrets out of your VM that's using their RAM.
Absolutely do what you can, but understand that it's futile to defend against your own cloud provider.
Ok I thought that was the whole point of things like Intel TDX , AMD SEV and various enclave mechanisms which provide full ram encryption and attestation ?
The only issue left would be managed services though, which then I wouldn’t use, but I’d be able to run my own postgre safely on infra I’m renting.
Supposedly, yes, but in a world that was caught flat footed with RowHammer, Spectre, and Meltdown; if I wouldn't trust those with a lot of other people's lives within a shared Cloud environment.
Intel's SGX has been broken a number of times and that should be harder to break than TDX. Like I said in my original comment though, do all the things. But if you find yourself relying on TDX to protect live(s), please pay a computer security professional to audit your security and do a threat assessment.
I’ll do all the things if ever needed, but I get that if a cloud act request happens , your cloud provider will be able to get your stuff.
I’m specialized enough in another field to know that I’m not a security person in spite of my interest in it ( I used to enjoy reverse engineering back in the days ) - I wouldn’t make that kind of decision without consulting a professional first.
I think many already started, the only reason it's starting to appear in the news is because people are making progress with the moves, and US companies are noticing it, but it's been planned and organized for a lot longer than just the last year.
This applies to any company, doesn't it?
Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply.
"I will never give up customer data" is a very tough promise to keep, if the government threatens you with your business license being revoked, your servers and domains being forcibly seized by the police, and you personally going to jail.
(Under the current US administration, we can add "A close examination of the immigration status of all foreign nationals employed by your company, followed by probable deportation or jail" to the list of potential consequences for resisting the government.)
The trick is to collect as little data as possible and to get rid of what you need to collect as quickly as you can. This is in direct opposition to the practices of companies like Microsoft which wants to spy on their users and profit from the data they collect though.
There's also an open question of how possible it is to run a system that doesn't collect/store data in a way that makes it possible to be collected by the government. The US government can force companies to compromise their systems or shut down their services if they refuse. In the past they've even threatened that shutting down a service instead of compromising it could still get operators in legal trouble.
At this point anyone who wants to keep the US government out of their data should avoid using any US company.
This is why I still prefer Signal; this practice seems to be their modus operandi even though they, too, were affected by AWS us-east-1 catastrophe
Signal used to never collect data on users, but they've changed that a while ago and now they keep user's name, photo, phone number, and a list of their contacts permanently in the cloud protected from the government by nothing except by a leaky enclave and a pin (https://web.archive.org/web/20250117232443/https://www.vice....)
More recently they've started collected the contents of messages into the cloud too, yet to this very day their privacy policy opens with the lie: "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." which hasn't been true for a very very long time. I consider their refusal to update their privacy policy to be a massive dead canary warning people that the service has already been compromised, but feel free to take your chances.
You're able to disable the pin feature to prevent that data from being saved though, so it definitely isn't a requirement.
I'm also not sure where you've read that they collect the contents of messages, because as far as I'm aware they still aren't doing that and I can't find any info online that indicates that they are (other than their secure backup feature that's opt-in only I suppose)
Actually you can't. If you choose not to set a pin, Signal just chooses one for you and uses that to upload all your data, only you won't be able to access it. There is no way to prevent your data from being sent to the cloud. For more info see here: https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin... and https://community.signalusers.org/t/what-contact-info-does-t...
The fact that Signal users are still unaware of where their data is going and when should tell you all you need to know about how trustworthy the service is. Not being 100% clear about the risks people take when using software which is promoted for use by people whose freedom and/or lives depend on it being secure is a very bad look for Signal.
As for message backups they are at least opt-in (for now anyway) and you can learn more about them here: https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/
Well shit.
Alternatives?
Was hard enough getting my circle on signal.
I don't have a good one sorry. I'm currently using silence for unsecured texting and jami for secure communication. Both are not something I'd recommend to regular people the way Signal used to be back when they let you get secure and insecure texts in one place.
Well this is especially significant because Microsoft is currently building a sovereign datacenter in France (nicknamed "Bleu"). I'm wondering what the consequence of that testimony will be.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...
> This applies to any company, doesn't it? Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply.
Not all countries have an equivalent to the USA CLOUD Act.
> Not all countries have an equivalent to the USA CLOUD Act.
Not yet, anyway. Unfortunately, pretty much every country seems to be getting less and less open and free over time. Some are better than others, but it does feel like everyone is regrettably rowing in same direction.
Your home country can tell you "Give us your data" and you have to comply
Not according to both Amazon's and Microsoft's historic marketing materials. They have always claimed that data stored in your local jurisdiction is not accessible to law enforcement abroad. And the US judiciary initially agreed with that: https://petri.com/microsoft-wins-appeal-data-stored-abroad-s...
...which then led to the US CLOUD act and here we are, once again, proving that the past is alterable; just like Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Well yes but that is all the more reason for EU entities to use EU companies for data storage.
Of course. But what if the holding lives in a country that don't enforce this (or is too weak to). Then all the subsidiaries are really sovereign from the host country perspective.
It seems the solution is ages old. Don't have the holding incorporated in an empire...
How would this work in practice? If the empire wants to get at your data, why do you think it would shy away from pressuring a country so weak that it can't afford to enforce this on their companies?
Then the empire just says that they want the data or you won't be allowed to operate in the empire, which would be bad for profits and anger shareholders.
That's not so. In a democratic state of law, the police can not unilaterally decide to seize you servers, and the politicians cannot tell the police to do so. Separation of powers is a thing.
Nice theory, that even on US isn't really working nowadays.
Why do you say "even" in the US?
What would stop them from doing that?
Capital flight
The alleged existence of this mechanism requires kind of a long feedback loop, and might not be reliable enough for some potential customers' taste.
> "I will never give up customer data" is a very tough promise to keep
If you don't have a spine, sure
That's what US companies are seen as from a European perspective: Spineless and untrustable
It's a great sales argument for locally grown software though, so I'm not complaining :)
> If you don't have a spine, sure
I've never understood this take. A lot of people were saying this sort of thing when Proton Mail turned over some user data to authorities in Europe a while back.
If you're running a tech company and run afoul of the law in some or another jurisdiction, it doesn't matter how much spine you think you have. When a group of men with guns, i.e. the police, shows up at your door and gives you the option of turning over some customer data or spending the next 10 years of your life in a steel cage, I'm betting that practically no one is going to choose the cage, spine or not.
The only way to keep user data safe is to not collect it in the first place.
Agreed with your last point. I'll disagree with everything else (except for the part about Proton, not really up to date on their operations)
> Carniaux did say that the situation had never arisen.
That's what he would say if the company was under a gag order in the US. So I would take anything they say with a mountain of salt.
Specifically here, he is under oath in France so an American gag order wouldn't protect him from the French justice system.
This make it less likely he's lying. It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law. Then the boss can swear to the Senate that they're complying.
This is exactly the system the US Congress accused TikTok of having set up.
If the data center is operated by a "trusted subsidiary" as the article mentions and everyone in key roles is a French citizen with no connection to the US then there is no one to give a gag order.
In practice the US HQ could mandate a security update that secretly uploads all data to the US but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't think anyone is ready to open.
the data center which runs software written and controlled by the US companies and likely has a 24/7 software related support team which is distributed across the world....
in a modern cloud dater center you don't need someone physically plugging a USB stick in a server, you just need a back door in a cloud software stack many times the size then any modern operating system which often even involves custom firmware for very low level components and where the attacker has the capabilities to convince your CPU vendor to help them...
... a backdoor that is a necessity anyway, because it is constantly used to upgrade the cluster software.
>In practice the US HQ could mandate a security update that secretly uploads all data to the US but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't think anyone is ready to open.
incredibly ambiguous/unsatisfying sentence. if this french hearing is concerned about french data security, then asking a question about your "in practice" is exactly a can of worms the french would like to open.
Everyone and everything is automatically downloading updates of US software. It's a door that is impossible to close in the short term.
> This is exactly the system the US Congress accused TikTok of having set up.
"Every accusation is a confession" remains undefeated
Agreed.
--
As a side rant:
"Specious accusations are often confessions."
I understand the psychology and casual use of absolutely worded reactions, and that their extreme expression is not taken literally, but as emphasis. But I still prefer balanced wording.
A surprisingly large number of people tragically clash and talk past each other over charged non-issues, that normal undramatic language would render moot.
I.e. "We must believe all X", vs. "We should listen to all X", ... and many more.
"Black Lives Matter Too", isn't as pithy. Nor should the last word be necessary for anyone to understand the three word version. But the fourth word, nodding to the wider context, pre-counters a lot of ridiculous responses to the original line. Not actually suggesting a sea change in a well recognized movement banner line. But it is a widely observed example of how any lack of pedantic clarity is seized upon by motivated reactionaries, to achieve politically significant impact via obtuse reinterpretation.
A little verbal pedantry is an effective speed bump against the siren song of motivated or inadvertent polarization.
It's naive or foolish to think that the problem with "Black Lives Matter" was insufficient specificity.
People who are not operating in good faith won't operate in good faith. There were thousands of words written on the phenomenon protested by BLM, but those are easily ignored. Three words are twisted and co-opted by propagandists. Consider a function that describes "comprehension by bigots" as a function of word count. We know that 0 words yields 0 comprehension. Evidence suggests that 10k words also yields 0 comprehension. There is no evidence that this Laffer curve will ever achieve anything other than zero.
It's possible to reach and change bigots' minds, but it requires human connections. Not sloganeering, prose, or reels.
I agree.
I wasn’t making a hard argument.
Words are not everything. Still, they matter.
To the degree that pushback against anti-minority mistreatment can be framed as pro-universal (reciprocal) respect, I think it helps. Given the latter is in fact the real, most general, and most relevant principle.
That avoids the framing created and imposed by biases. I.e. that somehow, race or other category is the question, instead of (logically and morally) irrelevant to the value of reciprocal respect. Not forgetting the point of it all, avoids actual or perceived reverse biasing. Minority rights and equality being interpreted by either side as anti-majority, or being at the expense of anyone.
Some shrill minority defenders do manage to imply that, as well the people having trouble respecting some group.
This are just thoughts based on what I find works better in personal encounters with people I know or ran into, who had/have difficulty seeing the world without in-group, out-group filters of various kinds.
Keep the simple, general, most important thing clear and center.
Avoid letting the conversation be artificially narrowed by exactly the destructive framing we want to push back on. The narrower the framing the more people forget, ignore, and successfully distract from the main principle. The more people get bogged down in narrower and narrower arguments, the less people understand each other.
> This make it less likely he's lying. It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law. Then the boss can swear to the Senate that they're complying.
It's also possible that US employees had access to French servers without anyone in France knowing.
Until this happened MS was still going around trying to convince lawyers to use their Cloud and telling them that there is no issue.
Including certain contractual "standard"(1) agreements which would make some of their higher management _personally_ liable for undue data access even under Cloud act from the US!!!
(1) As in standard agreements for providers which store lawyer data, including highly sensitive details about ongoing cases etc.
So you can't really trust MS anymore at all, even if personal liability (e.g. lying under oath) is at stack. And the max ceiling for the penalties for lying under oath seem less then what you can run into in the previous mentioned case...
You also have to look a bit closer at what it even means if "the french MS CEO swears they are complying" it means he doesn't know about non compliance and did tell his employees to comply and hired someone to verify it etc.
But the US doesn't need the French CEO to know, they just need to gain access to the French/EU server through US employees, which given that most of the infra software is written in the US and international admin teams for 24/7 support is really not that hard...
And even if you want to sue the French CEO after a breach/he (hypothetically) lied he would just say he didn't because he also was lied too leading to an endless goose chase and "upsi" by now the French CEO somehow is living in the US.
And that is if you ever learn about it happening, but thanks to the US having pretty bad gag orders/secret court stuff the chance for that is very low.
So from my POV it looks like MS has knowingly and systematically lying and deceiving customer, including such with highly sensitive data, and EU governments about how "safe" the data is even if it lead to personal legal liabilities of management.
And I mind to remember that AWS was giving similar guarantees they most most likely can't hold, but I'm not fully sure. Idk. about Google.
Oh and if you hope that the whole Sovereign Cloud things will help, it wont. It's a huge mage pretend theater moving millions over millions into the hands of US cloud providers while not providing a realistic solutions to the problem it is supposed to solve and neglecting local competition which actually could make a difference, smh.
The max penalty for things like this is actually life inprisonment though. If you, to aid a foreign power without authorization gather certain types of information, it's espionage.
There wouldn't be any lawsuit. If you do this kind of things you get arrested, get a trial and then you are in prison forever.
except we are speaking about lying under oath, not espionage, you don't get a trail for espionage because you lie under oath
and leading management also technically doesn't need to know that is happens for it to be doable. Or in other words they have a lot of reason to "accidentally" not know about it/have it overlooked
this means even if it happens they are very unlikely to be charged for anything more then negligence
but the contracts I mentioned above basically state "it doesn't matter why it happens and if you knew or if it was your fault as long as there was the smallest bit of negligence on your side you are on the hook for it personally". So in a situation where they can effectively avoid espionage trials (because they didn't commit espionage, just negligence) they still are hold responsible
if high level management would reliable go to prison for things like that you wouldn't need additional contracts to make sure they actually have insensitive to actively try to find/prevent anything like this/act very non-negligent.
He wouldn't even be charged for lying under oath if he lied and it became apparent, because there'd be not considering the much more serious espionage charges. They'd only prosecute the espionage part.
Participating in a plot to supply french state information to the US is espionage. France also apparently has a broad definition of espionage, relative to some other EU countries.
States have a tendency of coming down rather harshly on this kind of thing, so this idea about negligence is I think unlikely. If you know about it the charges will be espionage charges. If it happened it would be the biggest thing ever. They'd arrest most Microsoft employees in relevant teams as well the leadership, probably many others too. Just interrogation would probably take half a year due to lack of interrogators.
Less likely doesn't say much though. He may have simply weighed the chances of the French government ever finding out that he lied.
> It could be possible Microsoft France has a "rogue" employee system where a key person only obeys to Microsoft US orders rather than his French boss and French law.
I would think that is not just a possibility, but a certainty.
An inevitable consequence of this administration destroying US foreign influence and power at an unprecedented rate is that (IMHO) it is inevitable that the EU builds their own cloud and mandates its use for EU data. It is becoming a matter of national security.
The interesting thing is that the US is acting in the exact way that they accuse China of acting. Companies like Huawei are forbidden from installing telecom infrastructure for "national security" reasons [1]. One of justifications for first banning then forcing a sale of Tiktok was because of possible Chinese government interference. It's only a matter of time before the EU and China start making the same determination against US tech giants (eg Meta executive brags about silencing dissent [2]).
This administration really is killing the golden goose.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-e...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eO8byuv6PE
Huawei is itself fully to blame. They knowingly supplied equipment to Iran.
Yeaah! God forbid anyone trades with those whom the US targets. But the US sending 70% of the bombs Israel used to murder children is okay though...
I don't think that YouTube video is a good supporting piece for your point. The spokesperson says they don't want to propagate harmful stereotypes. "brag about silencing dissent" seems like a strawman interpretation
A better faith interpretation is that people are free to criticize Israel and Zionism on Meta, just not using racist tropes.
Oh if that were only true. It's been made apparent in the last 2 years in particular that fighting antisemitism from the perspective of the ADL and figures like Jordana Cutler (who previously worked for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office) simply means silencing critcism of Israel, even when that means siding with actual antisemites (up to and including neo_nazis and outright Nazis). Examples:
- Ben Shapiro excuses antisemitic remarks by Ann Coulter because she's pro-Israel [1];
- ADL defends Elon Musk for making the Nazi salute (twice) on stage [2]
- We brutalized people with the police for organizing peaceful protests to say "maybe we shouldn't bomb children" or to get their respective universities to divest their endowments from the state doing the bombing;
- We went so far as trying to deport legal permanent residents for organizing said peaceful protests (ie Mahmoud Khalil); and
- The IHRA definition of antisemitism includes criticisms of the state of Israel.
[1]: https://x.com/benshapiro/status/644505141299671041
[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/22/adl-faces-backlash-...
I was replying to the claims on big tech company policies. Jordana Cutler appears to be an internal advocate for reducing antisemitism on the Meta platform. They don't set policy. There are many similar roles for many different groups, it's how the company tries to hear more points of view before making policy changes.
We can only judge big tech company policy based on its declaration or application. So far I see no supported criticisms of either, though I am open to them.
Meta is one of the worst for silencing ("downranking" or outright removing) pro-Palestinian content [1]. That's what Cutler is bragging about.
But it would be a mistake to single out Meta here. All these big tech companies move in lockstep with US foreign policy to appease the administration to get approvals for mergers, to end investigations and antitrust suits, to get government contracts and so on.
[1]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Some of us remember Americans going ape shit over that Kirk guy lmao.
But then who can? No global cloud providers, including Hetzner and OVH, are free from CLOUD act because they have US presence[1].
1. https://us.ovhcloud.com/legal/faqs/cloud-act/
OVHCloud US is a different company from the rest of the world.
https://blog.ovhcloud.com/cloud-data-act/
The separation is even in the URLs, all the locales are using paths, except the US, which lives under us.ovhcloud.com. All locales use a customer console hosted at ovh.com, except the US, which has it under us.ovhcloud.com.
You can't just spin up an LLC and call it a separate company. OVHCloud is still OVHCloud US' subsidiary company.
From the FAQ page I linked:
> In accordance with our Privacy Policy, OVHcloud will comply with lawful requests from public authorities. Under the CLOUD Act, that could include data stored outside of the United States. OVHcloud will consider the availability of legal mechanisms to quash or modify requests as permitted by the CLOUD Act.
>You can't just spin up an LLC and call it a separate company.
You can actually. Becton Dickson did it and shafted loads of their employees by saying they no longer have pensions with them.
> OVHCloud is still OVHCloud US' subsidiary company.
It’s the other way around.
> From the FAQ page I linked:
Which is for the US company.
Who? You can use Hetzner and OVH proper instead of US subsidiaries. Using AWS/Azure/GC in Europe these days is pretty risky for more than one reason.
I think we'll see a lot of companies moving away from public cloud providers in the future, but I don't think it'll be because of any privacy-related concerns.
It rarely makes economic sense to deploy workloads onto the public cloud unless you have critical uptime requirements or need massive elasticity.
FISA and the Stored Communications Act as modified by the CLOUD Act don't distinguish between (i) parent company overseas + US subsidiary and (ii) parent company in US + foreign subsidiary. In both instances the US asserts personal jurisdiction, extending to wherever the data is stored geographically.
The US has no authority whatsoever over a foreign parent company. The US subsidiary also has no access to "foreign" data.
The US by and large can (and does) assert authority outside of its jurisdiction, from which another country can choose to capitulate.
Most of the time countries do, because they are all swapping data on their citizens between themselves to skirt various laws.
In the case where the US really wants something, and the country won't yield, they'll fund contras or destabilize the government (if small enough to be bullied) or impose sanctions so drastic it's effectively a soft act of war.
This is all to say that, the US has nearly unlimited authority while it stands as the world's defacto superpower.
They can assert what they want, they have no way to enforce it.
Pretty funny you're jumping straight to warfare. This proves why Americans cannot be trusted.
In any case, it's better for me that the Americans will need to start a war with the EU to get at my data instead of just giving it to them.
We agree, I'm not saying anything is good or desirable. Just pointing out, this is how they achieve overreach: coercion.
I'd argue that placing faith in any large institution is folly. Especially when that institution has a bunch of perverse incentives to act immorally.
Any nation with any amount of leverage has abused it.
The unfortunate truth, 300,000 years later and humans still operate on "might makes right" whether militarily, or economically.
If the violent, untrustworthy, Americans choose to go to war with their former allies over some data then that's their choice. Better than just giving these warmongers everything they want.
https://www.alibabacloud.com/en?_p_lc=1
Exoscale is a European cloud provider with no exposure to the CLOUD Act.
(I work there.)
Possibly only their US subsidiaries though?
I'm guessing: Russia?
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A bit of a "hoist by their own petard" situation since the US has been raising this specter about Chinese tech for quite some time.
Yes. For Europe there isn't a real alternative other than to painstakingly re-grow our independence. That will take a long time.
The whole concept of big cloud somehow setting up sovereign clouds in Europe seems incredibly naive to me.
Every AWS employee knows where his bread is buttered - Seattle not Brussels
Apparently someone buys it, otherwise AWS would not invest 8+ billions in Germany: https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/aws-plans-to-invest-7-8-...
"If it's certified, it must be good".
They buy it because it's enough to tick the corporate compliance box. Decisions made by people that don't actually give a F
It's all because of something that started years ago: the move to the cloud.
Companies started to move to cloud like there was no tomorrow.
Their on-prem products became maintenance or zombies.
Now you want the self hosted? Good luck.
What's the alternative for a SaaS provider? Support all the possible cloud alternatives? That's nearly impossible, so some companies (mainly big organizations) provide their software/SaaS in AWS gov regions and so be it.
(Or... be smart, see the trend and start selling your software again in self-hosted solutions!)
For a consumer (gov, for example) this means: you don't have that feature, you give in, or you build it/let it build (open source).
This is the only reason why we saw the recent announcement of the Austrian govt that was able to migrate from MS to Nextcloud. Without an alternative, ... they couldn't have done anything.
Yep when the CIA calls every American salutes and follows orders.
Well no, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and Tim Apple will come grovelling when they are called... that's all it takes.
If you do something that the EU doesn't like it's response will be relatively rational and proportional. While the US government is currently run by unpredictable and volatile people. So risk/reward wise it's rather obvious whose orders they will be following.
Yup. I always thought it was a way just to get business in EU. Do some performative dance of "hey, look! a separate DC building with EU employees only" and then hope nobody would ask too many questions.
Then the next level is regulators in EU also have to care and can't just say "ok, you have a separate DC building with EU employees only. Good. My job is done, I checked" and move on.
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> U.S. companies can be forced to hand over data, regardless of where it is stored
s/U.S./Chinese/
Tomato <=> Tomato
Governments are not exempt from Cloud Act and US providers can be under gag order, so from EU or UK government perspective, they will never know if data has been accessed by 3rd country and what happened to it.
This is actually amazing that all the tenders have not been rejected under national security grounds or simply security services (yet again) have not done the job tax payers pay them to do.
> they will never know if data has been accessed by 3rd country and what happened to it.
They should have arranged to get a 100 euro refund every time it happens, or 440 euros if the UK does it.
Luckily we have great European cloud companies like UpCloud https://upcloud.com
With 3 data centers in the USA, seems like they are probably subject to the CLOUD act.
This is known. The problem is that the EU is hooked on us technology. I don’t see this untangling soon which is a big strategic weakness
Pretty much yes. From Saas to authentication systems to OS to chips. The EU infra is entirely dependent on the US. All documents, emails, chat messages, and most forms of storage are directly or indirectly linked to an American service.
On top of that, the US can update it all remotely, including the hardware now thanks to things like intel ME.
Let's hope we never get into a conflict with them, because even without bombs, they can basically shut us down with a few keystrokes: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/the-eu-can-be-shut-down-with-a-fe...
Or at least have everything they need to develop such a capability. And it's not like the current people in power care much about alienating other countries.
> the US can update it all remotely, including the hardware now thanks to things like intel ME
Let's not be excessively alarmist; AFAIK, the Intel ME is not (unless you're using things like vPro) exposed directly to the network, you need the cooperation of the operating system to reach the ME.
Of course, said operating system is usually Microsoft Windows, which can be updated remotely... (and even Linux users often use USA-based distributions).
According to its specs, but since it's a black box for which we have neither the source nor the design documents, and given that implementing back doors is a regular request from governments, it's a logical concern.
> From Saas to authentication systems to OS to chips. The EU infra is entirely dependent on the US.
I would absolutely love to see the EU invest in developing processors and operating systems. It'd benefit us all to have real competition in those spaces, and it's the only way the EU can ever keep their data out of the hands of the US government.
It’s an old new (July 22)
Anyone who's read the law has known this for years.
The GDPR is incompatible with the Cloud Act, and so the only legal (or so it should be) way to use US companies is to treat them like unsafe third countries - no matter the data center location.
But everyone wants to continue like before. Having to ensure that Amazon and Azure never touches unincrypted personal data is hard. So one "compromise" after another has been tried - never solving the actual problem.
As a EU citizen I think it's entirely embarrassing. Either the EU should have the power to force European subsidiaries to be exempted from the cloud act, or everyone should be forced to abide the law, which would greatly boost EU tech. Instead we are just rolling over.
I can't imagine the Cloud Act being effective without Microsoft (and French gov) complicity.
If they can make successful tax shelters they can architect the entities and the architecture to remove this option.
There's some 9-eyes thing where this is a feature not a bug
Microsoft tried architecting a "surveillance shelter" in Ireland. It worked. That's actually why the CLOUD Act even exists[0]: it was passed specifically to prohibit Microsoft from doing this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_Stat...
I wouldn't think "sovereign" EU data would be protected from US snooping either, unless the Five Eyes Plus alliance is going to be dissolved. Even then...
Well, not relying on US cloud would already be a giant step in the right direction, by making it significantly harder to snoop on the data.
I don't believe that's the case because the intelligence pooling is meant to remove cross-border friction. A general breakdown of western alliances would probably be required (and maybe that's where we're headed.)
> A general breakdown of western alliances would probably be required
Hearing a distant shout of "hold my beer" from the White House...
Not just headed, it is already in the process.
With UK out there's no Five Eyes members in EU.
"Plus" is key - Five Eyes Plus includes EU members France and Germany, at minimum. It's a comfortable informal relationship between Five Eyes and highly trusted nations that have almost joined Five Eyes in the past. France was closest to becoming the official sixth eye under Obama. Japan is another of these nations.
I suspect the other 4 eyes are somewhat less willing to do the US regime's bidding these days
On what basis?
Might have Something to do with the current US administration tweeting pictures of confidential material in the past, exposing their capabilities to the world. Intelligence community members tend to hold their cards close to their chests.
I mean, do you see any actual moves they’ve made to move away from the US? I don’t. They always make a lot of noise about how this time they’re not going to take the depredations of the US before doing just that.
I'm flattered that you think that the intelligence agencies of the four other "eyes", Australia, Canada, New Zealand; would tell me their moves, or that I'd hear about it, but honestly, I'm not that important.
Seriously though, what are you expecting to hear? For the CSIS to post to Twitter what they're hiding from the CIA, as if the CIA hasn't heard of Twitter or something? Or for the GCSB to broadcast which billionaires are making bunkers in Hammer Springs to /r/secretbillionairebunkers like someone is wrong on WarThunder?
What I'm saying is the spooks of their respective countries are just gonna keep a bit more to themselves and not tell the US because the think someone in the current US administration is going to leak it, putting their assets at risk. The respective secret agencies haven't put out coordinated press releases saying they're doing this or gone on the talk show tour to talk about it, so I have no proof, but it seems quite possible to me that they are.
I wonder why people are surprised, as this is an open secret nobody is willing to admit. And it's basically the reason we had Schrim I and Schrim II.
At the same time a massive migration from US cloud in EU to EU cloud would be a massive pain for a lot of companies in the EU.
Of course they can’t. U.S. companies are under U.S. jurisdiction, no matter where their data centers are located.
This is a French company owned by a US company though which makes things complex.
US cloud act is definitely an overreach. Suddenly private infrastructure is now an extension of the government surveillance complex. This is the equivalent of the govt being able to put a camera on your building because they want to observe the public/private area around it.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway, with my keys ? If the crypto is strong enough then surely cloud providers can’t do anything with it ?
> Maybe I’m misunderstanding something - if I store my data elsewhere , am I not supposed to encrypt it anyway
"Cloud" is not only for storage; it's also for compute. Doing compute directly on encrypted data (homomorphic encryption) is very slow and very complicated, so when using a cloud, the data is usually either unencrypted, or encrypted but the key is elsewhere in the same cloud.
Thanks.
I get that FHE is not realistic today, but can’t I use ( if it’s really critical) a combination of confidential vms and an external hsm ? I understand I’ll be limited to traditional workloads , and not managed services though.
I asked the wrong question, what I really meant was ‘if I run in a less trusted environment, am I not supposed to use all possible crypto mechanisms available to make that environment more trustworthy , so that I can’t be deceived by my cloud operator sending my data to the us government’
That's just not possible. It's why detractors never got on board with the Cloud. Until FHE is feasible, the decryption keys and plaintext have to exists in RAM eventually at some point in order even if only took be re-encrypted, if any complex work is to be done on it. Because eg, Amazon, has access to your hardware, there's simply no way to prevent them from reading your secrets out of your VM that's using their RAM.
Absolutely do what you can, but understand that it's futile to defend against your own cloud provider.
Ok I thought that was the whole point of things like Intel TDX , AMD SEV and various enclave mechanisms which provide full ram encryption and attestation ?
The only issue left would be managed services though, which then I wouldn’t use, but I’d be able to run my own postgre safely on infra I’m renting.
Supposedly, yes, but in a world that was caught flat footed with RowHammer, Spectre, and Meltdown; if I wouldn't trust those with a lot of other people's lives within a shared Cloud environment.
Intel's SGX has been broken a number of times and that should be harder to break than TDX. Like I said in my original comment though, do all the things. But if you find yourself relying on TDX to protect live(s), please pay a computer security professional to audit your security and do a threat assessment.
eg, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746753
Point taken, thanks a lot for playing along.
I’ll do all the things if ever needed, but I get that if a cloud act request happens , your cloud provider will be able to get your stuff.
I’m specialized enough in another field to know that I’m not a security person in spite of my interest in it ( I used to enjoy reverse engineering back in the days ) - I wouldn’t make that kind of decision without consulting a professional first.
after this whopping great vulnerability in Azure, anything there prior to that being fixed should be considered public anyway:
https://dirkjanm.io/obtaining-global-admin-in-every-entra-id...
Don't forget when Azure had it's root cert compromised. Which... maybe is still a thing?
Another take: Microsoft admitted under oath in France that the US government doesn't care enough about French data to ever have requested any.
I'm sure if you asked the current administration what they think of France, they'd reply, "all they do is wine!"
The current administration will have difficulties pointing to France on a map.
Time to pull away all EU data from the Trump USA.
I think many already started, the only reason it's starting to appear in the news is because people are making progress with the moves, and US companies are noticing it, but it's been planned and organized for a lot longer than just the last year.
I think starting from the day after CLOUD act was approved (2018).
Crazy to even think that such a law exists.
Can assure you it has been happening for a while.
What difference, at this point, does it make? The EU has already surrendered any notion of sovereignty to the US in the fields of military and energy.