Hacker News Reader

Comment by sentenza | Hacker News Reader

Some of the other commenters seem to underestimate the extreme shift, caused by the NSA scandal, in how the US is perceived in some parts of Europe (and I guess Brasil).

NSA surveillance (and hacking!) is pevasive of all that is digital. They even directly attack private individuals in Europe, considering them as worthless pawns. (Don't believe me? Google "Belgacom Hack")

To those of us living in countries that had to struggle to rid themselves of the surveillance state, this _feels_ like enemy action.

So why should people over here perceive a country that has declared them fair game to its large security apparatus be anything other than an enemy?

Do not underestimate the consequences of the NSA actions. The mistrust that is growing right now could undo important parts of the digital globalization.

View on HN

I was talking to someone who works for a company that does cloud hosting of very high end business applications (i.e. specialized finance systems) and he said they were seeing a lot of European companies starting to look at moving their hosting from the US to the EU - largely due to the recent NSA revelations.

I must admit that this rather surprised me - but I have no reason to doubt him.

There are other costs outside of the US also: Given that the NSA is so aggressive (all pipes being suspect now) the changes politically demanded will:

-lessen convenience of all software and increasing the costs for users to interact with it in terms of time and complexity.

-building and deploying security solutions can be expensive especially to those products that do not lend themselves to security--more engineering increases costs.

-increase in cpu cycles as we all increase key sizes and introduce encryption where once there was none, or limited for authentication only.

Id bet this will be a small drag on the world economy and certainly a drag on the world software industry. It could be thought of as a world wide tax.

There could be a slightly brighter side to it, if you consider the additional security to be a good thing.

> I must admit that this rather surprised me

Why does it surprise you? It's come to light the American government is sifting through everything it can get it's hands on. Any rational person would take steps to try and prevent their important data being looked at.

The NSA's job has been to spy on foreigners since the Cold War. I don't understand how the new revelations are some how a big surprise?

Also moving your cloud hosting to an EU country is probably going to buy you exactly zero safety. The majority of the internet traffic in the world routes through the USA regardless or origin / destination.

Also moving your cloud hosting to an EU country is probably going to buy you exactly zero safety.

Economically it may have some effect though. A lot of this is sending a message as much as securing anything.

edit - also, anyone serious who is switching from US servers over this issue at the moment will be unlikely to be only switching servers, it will most likely be just the first part of a general security upgrade.

> The majority of the internet traffic in the world routes through the USA regardless or origin / destination.

I was suspicious of your claim since this didn't line up with my experience of using traceroute. So, I don't think this is really true anymore; especially for Europe. Have a look at this infografic [1] by the NYtimes linked from this 2008 (!) article [2].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/30/business/30pipe... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html

Foreign governments, yes. But the wholesale monitoring of the public at large (every last one of us) is what came as a bit of a revalation.

I recall times when we in Europe perceived NSA to be working on behalf of us to protect against our common threats in China/Russia/Mideast/whatever - you know, being allies, NATO, common military operations, so on.

Seeing them as the most powerful force hostile against us in the digital world is some shift in mindset, when coming from that history.

They aren't spying on you (if in fact you aren't plotting to kill Americans)...

How would they find that out without first spying on you?

As general Alexander mentioned in the 60 Minutes interview, they may collect lots of data but don't examine it or bother to look until they have a warrant or need. Kind if like what you do with your logging collection service....

NSA is known to abuse their intel for USA commercial interests (the largest published example probably is Airbus vs Boeing).

You don't have to fear them unless you're a terrorist. Or you're a member of a social organization with a somewhat similar name to a religious organization (Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim case, for example) in which case US authorities will treat your info as terrorist info. Or your partner criticizes US government (e.g. David Miranda case), in which case your communications apparently can be intercepted as well. Or your company competes with US companies. Or something else that I hadn't noticed...

I mean "may collect lots of data until they have some need to use it" is evil enough to be perceived as a hostile enemy act.

Prove it. "Trust us" is not verifiable.

Finance is all about informational asymmetries. If I traded on informational asymmetries, I'd consider the US government surveillance apparatus to be a huge threat. At the end of the day, the analysts at Fort Meade are probably the least worrisome of the people with access to all this data. The biggest threat are all the consultancies involved in the US intelligence industry. Companies like Booz Allen simply have too many ties to the financial industry and the security industry, and anyone who has worked in finance knows that Chinese walls and other mechanisms to prevent conflicts of interest are simply security theater.

The feigned outrage of EU leaders who have data sharing agreements with the NSA is not credible. Europe has outsourced most of their defense and intelligence for good reason, why do everything twice when the West is cooperating with each other. I'll believe there is a problem when Germany even begins to consider closing a couple US military bases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com