We’ve all seen the massive move to cloud and push my Microsoft to get us all there even more. Â What concerns me is the fact that the NSA has been saving every single thing we’ve been doing in the cloud for years already via its Prism Program, without our knowledge.
Once the internet giants have got us 100% online, what’s stopping them from pulling the plug on us unless we fork out ridiculous sums of money? Â There are thousands of companies all over the world apart from the billions of people all storing everything online. Â How do we protect ourselves if Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Youtube and friends join forces against us?
+1 for the posts by Seb and Maarten 🙂
For me security is about balancing the following;
- What is the likelihood that something will get out?
- What is the damage/consequence of it getting out?
- How much time and effort can I expend making sure it doesn’t get out?
- How will my efforts to prevent it getting out affect usability?
The revelations about PRISM and associated shenanigans obviously impact point number 1 the most, but what about the rest?
As for number 2, I’m not sure how much the NSA cares about my Office 365 account in all the petabytes of data they must have collected. I don’t feel like I have anything to hide*
Number 3 doesn’t change much as I’ve always assumed that once I moved to cloud, I could only control local security and since NSA/GCHQ can allegedly access pretty much what they want, it won’t help to move from one cloud vendor to another.
Number 4 stops me from leaving the cloud altogether. I could not afford to move my business back on premises now but I can see that for companies who are hybrid or have not started with cloud yet that this gives them pause for thought.
I’m actually more worried about the 2nd or 3rd order effects of government data snooping, specifically the following;
- How secure are they? I don’t want evil hackers breaking into the governments servers and stealing anything they can use for identity theft etc.
- * with reference to the earlier point about having nothing to hide… Can I trust the government not to move the goalposts? For example, lets say that I made a comment online about hating cats. If it becomes a hate crime to speak out against cats will this data be used to prosecute me?
In summary, barring the zombie apocalypse, cloud is here to stay, Big Brother *is* watching and there’s not a lot we can do about it apart from keeping a critical eye on how our governments behave and holding them to account.
