All of this seems quite a distraction for an analytics company.
Just locate your servers where it makes business sense. Secure them against hackers and unauthorised access in general, as you should. Ignore the CIA/NSA.
Just locate your servers where it makes business sense. Secure them against hackers and unauthorised access in general, as you should. Ignore the CIA/NSA.
In more seriousness, not all is purely making money. Some people prefer to make a difference in some things they have control over even if this doesn't increase profits. I find this a lot better than e.g. getting more money and then donating to charities that try to stop what the company is contributing to.
Maybe they are trying to reach more people through blogpost and HN post, but moving the servers to another country does not seem like just theatrics at all.
If you are actually a terrorist, smuggler, human trafficker, weapons dealer, you aren’t commenting on pull requests to EasyList.
Most people are boring and, despite what they may think of themselves, aren’t even close to being a surveillance target. It’s also ridiculous theater to think that the country a server is physically in matters one bit.
To be clear, I am not defending NSA, I am just saying that most of us are uninteresting in that regard.
Actually such people are great targets for blackmail, to be used in espionage and interference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recruitment_of_spies#Recruitme...
It's completely naive to think that only serious wrongdoers are the targets of SIGINT, rather than simply anyone with usefulness to state motives.
You can play the statistics game and say that this will never matter for 99.9% of people, but when multiplied by all people who have info that'd hurt them if it became public (everybody!), it makes for a very powerful tool for oppression.