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posted by janrinok on Monday March 26 2018, @11:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the does-any-other-nation-do-this? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:59PM (#659045)

    Right, because Democrats respect privacy. Any NSA spying being done was absolutely carried out solely due to George W. Bush's government, and they just secretly did it without telling Obama. Who of course wanted it all shut down. And he definitely didn't extend the Patriot Act. And I'm sure he would have pardoned Snowden, but, you know, Republicans bullied him?

    The only Democrat I've seen showing any respect for privacy has been Hillary. And it was her own, which is why she was using her own private email server. Until this country has a viable Pirate Party option, the only real solution for privacy minded individuals is to create it for ourselves. Use encryption where possible, host things yourself, and mitigate web based tracking with the myriad browser extensions available (ad-blockers, NoScript, HTTP referrer spoofers, cookie management, etc), and perhaps a VPN or two.

    Of course, helping create or build any local Pirate Party in your area may not be a bad idea either, but it's probably worth remembering that any efforts in this arena are to protect the privacy of the next generation or two or three. If you want privacy now, you have to take it.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:08PM (#659712)

    See? You all share the same problem. Where did I mention anything about democrats? You have many choices. You should try using them, or at the very least acknowledge them, before jumping to conclusions and shooting off your mouth. You will get your pirate party option when you have enough signatures on the petition. That is the procedure, so get yer ass in gear!