Re: @Titus Technophobe.
But that rule goes out the window with the USG. THE PATRIOT Act puts my data in a direct relationship with the US government ……….. not have to hope that it's too busy not to nose into my business basically because they can.
The point I would make is if the US governments use the Patriot act what use can they make of the ceased information? Assuming that you were planning a terrorist act then obviously they might well find a use. If it was just information that might be of commercial interest to say a competitor then both the international laws on Intellectual property and indeed DPA would apply.
Now then you may have a point in saying that the subsequent litigation in the states could well be prohibitive in terms of both costs and time. But it isn't true that you have no control over the data.
Your PoV only makes any sense if you are a)Very trusting in governments not abusing their powers b)Ignorant of how much … officially a and b.
Now then this is quite interesting you seem to be accusing me of naivety? Let’s just compare what would happen with our two points of few. Say for example you and I developed a new super duper algorithm for ‘Airline Bookings’ (this would be topical to the Ed Snowden story).
I am assuming you would develop it on Amazon and store it on their worldwide cloud. Knowing that this could be worth money I would develop it on a local system and store it on a DVD in a locked drawer in my house (*1).
So for arguments sake the US government gets wind of our two inventions and decides that they want to get hold of the code to give to one of their local companies. What happens?
POV 1 – Yours they rip it off the Amazon cloud and it give it to the competitor. You then spend a few day’s bleating about how it is unfair, yada yada. Then get tied up in litigation.
POV 2 – Mine I guess they have two options:
a. they could try and steal the disk in which case with luck the CIA operative will set off the burglar alarm, get bitten by the dog and nicked by the local Fuzz. Hopefully all three.
b. They could perhaps accuse me of breaking into NASA’s web site whilst looking for UFO’s (which I haven’t even been near btw). Local Police get involved and for reasons that defy any sane explanation decide that I have done the dirty on US computers. Years later they get the code from my clammy hand in a US state pen….. Mind by then it is pretty useless anyway.
More likely the Local Plod tells the US that there is no evidence for the accusation.
It may appear that I trust democratic governments and international laws more than you, but the reality is that I accept the world as it is …. Coming back to the BA dirty tricks I thought that Virgin were totally insane to host their data on a BA system. Just as in my example above as I have said a few times before (until such time as it were a product and sold) it would be very stupid to put important information near the Internet.
I'll remind you that the internetwork was established specifically to enable remote researchers to gain access to high performance or specialist computing resources that they did not or could not do themselves.
Why remind me I know this :) in fact I have made this point in response to a previous comment by somebody bleating on about t defense organisations monitoring traffic on their own network. You could also go on to mention that these weren't just researchers they were in fact people working for ARPA which then got renamed to DARPA. The original back bone of the Internet at that time was called ARPANET.
Again are you really that trusting or that ignorant?
Oh yes .... No! but it would seem that you are?
(*1) preferably right next to where the dog sleeps on a night.....