Technology and Privacy

Introduction

The Patriot Act in the United States, is the most strict and forceful weapon against terrorism and international organized crime. This Act is largely based on the resolutions of the fiftieth general assembly and of resolutions 1373 and 1390, the United Nations in New York, the act of citizenship and immigration in the United States and the American National Security Act (Kerr, 7).

Thesis statement

Government of United States is abusing the Patriot Act, which once was meant to protect us, but now it is destroying state privacy rights.

Discussion

The USA Patriot Act, while it was originally constructed for the safety of America and to fortify and strengthen it, violates many areas of the constitution and grants the government practically unlimited power to do whatever they wish to terrorists or potential terrorists. Progress has been made that the effects of the implementation of the Patriot Act in the United States could extend beyond U.S. borders and thus violates the privacy rights of thousands of non U.S. and foreign companies. Since the Act appears to be present to stay, it is important each foreign individual, whether Canadian or not, think how, either directly or indirectly, could affect this Act.

The USA Patriot Act expands government tactics to facilitate in recognizing terrorists and to obstruct terrorist acts by permitting arrests with no available warrants in hand and no legit reason, searches and seizures without informing the individual at all that they are going to be searched, even after their privacy has been compromised, wiretapping without the administration of the court, and secret confinement or taking people into custody in secret and not letting anyone know of the person's whereabouts without proper supervision, us if a terrorist is buying ingredients or reading books on how to obstruct a bomb, should not the government be able to find out their plans, which would involve invading their privacy, but it could save lives.

Politico is running a fantastic piece on the problems that the Patriot Act is raising for American cloud companies in the market for overseas customers (Mojuyé, 258). The piece details how foreign cloud customers are worried that the US government will use its expanded surveillance powers to snoop on any data that is stored on US soil, so they are eschewing US-based cloud providers in favor of the competition. Non-US competitors are explicitly feeding this trend by raising the specter of US government data snooping as part of their bids for business, a tactic that seems to be working in some cases.

The piece quotes a number of lobbyists and government officials to the effect that all of this Patriot-based fear is just so much FUD and misinformation, I've been covering the growth of covering computer-automated mass surveillance for over a decade, and cloud for the past few years, and I see the following factors as a serious problem for stateside cloud providers:

Private sector policies with respect to sharing data with law enforcement are not uniform across cloud providers, and they are often not completely clear ...