Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning.
"People deserve the right to a better process." Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of Representatives Committee on Rules, when, after 8:00 PM EST on Wednesday, he and his colleagues were handed a 2,232-page bill to review and approve for a floor vote by the next morning.
In the final pages of the bill—meant only to appropriate future government spending—lawmakers snuck in a separate piece of legislation that made no mention of funds, salaries, or budget cuts. Instead, this final, tacked-on piece of legislation will erode privacy protections around the globe.
[...] As we wrote before, the CLOUD Act is a far-reaching, privacy-upending piece of legislation that will:
- Enable foreign police to collect and wiretap people's communications from U.S. companies, without obtaining a U.S. warrant.
- Allow foreign nations to demand personal data stored in the United States, without prior review by a judge.
- Allow the U.S. president to enter "executive agreements" that empower police in foreign nations that have weaker privacy laws than the United States to seize data in the United States while ignoring U.S. privacy laws.
- Allow foreign police to collect someone's data without notifying them about it.
- Empower U.S. police to grab any data, regardless if it's a U.S. person's or not, no matter where it is stored.
Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflected-cloud-act-passes
See also: As the CLOUD Act sneaks into the omnibus, big tech butts heads with privacy advocates
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:25AM
The lack of HP Sauce has been a thorn in our sides for far too long. It'd seem the Queen is holding it back as part of her grudge for the colonies leaving the empire.