I'm featuring highlights from one, two, three, four and finally a fifth article covering "The Cloud Act" which was passed in yesterday's Omnibus bill. The one Trump claimed he would VETO, but, then didn't!Lifetime ActorZuckerberg surely engaged in some theatre on a massive scale- Oh poor fellow? He was really on the hot seat...... Not! Great acting job there Mark! Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook had so much to gain from The Cloud Act, making his Cambridge Analytica/Facebook/ Russia "apology" a really small price to pay.
“The CLOUD Act part, according to the text in its Senate version, would "improve law enforcement access to data stored across borders, and for other purposes." At issue is what happens in the increasingly frequent instance in which law enforcement in one country is seeking data held on a cloud server in another country.The bill would give the executive branch, specifically the Department of Justice, new powers to enter into information-sharing agreements with foreign governments. As of now, if a foreign law enforcement entity wishes to obtain data from a U.S.-based tech company, that government must have a specific mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) with the U.S., the kind that must be ratified by Congress. The CLOUD Act removes that provision, while also no longer requiring the need for a judge to sign off on such requests. It would allow the DOJ to enter into such agreements without the approval of Congress or the courts.
Passage of the Act is critically important for modernizing (defined how?) our outdated data privacy laws, because it would provide legal clarity when a country serves a warrant to a domestic company to collect data from its customers residing in another country. The Act would streamline ( expedite) requests by law enforcement for digital data, while avoiding the delays and costs of litigation, (necessary protections) as well as avoiding potential violations of privacy laws (because there is no real data privacy) in foreign countries.Apple had pushed for the CLOUD Act, signing a letter to its four Senate cosponsors last month along with tech giants Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Oath (the Verizon subsidiary that owns AOL and Yahoo.) The letter, to Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Christopher Coons (D-CT)”
Republicans and Democrats, together, pushed for this- Any blaming Republicans is just more of that phony left vs right illusion
It (Cloud Act) avoids exposing multi-national U.S. corporations to potential reprisals and economic boycotts by foreign nations. The CLOUD Act is designed to save Facebook, Google, and other companies the legal fees involved in dealing with the many different privacy requirements and legal obligations social networks and tech companies face around the world. Hidden in the omnibus bill, it essentially allows any government to request data from these companies, provided the attorney general signs off on it, regardless of where it happens to be stored. For tech companies, this is great! Of course, if you are, say, an activist campaigning against a repressive government, a journalist an intelligence service would like to discredit, or just somebody who would rather not have any jerk with a password looking through your camera roll for nudes, it’s not so great.
In fact, in terms of expansiveness and oversight, it has a lot in common with PRISM, the NSA’s vast surveillance network that quickly became heavily abused and was a massive privacy scandal during the Obama administration. That should be particularly worrying because, as the Daily Beast points out, this allows American authorities a backdoor to just go through your digital stuff.
Barack Obama Justifies Prism NSA Surveillance Programme, Saying It Has Saved Lives The passing of a Global Technocratic Big Brother bill was obfuscated by the nonsensical Cambridge Analytica “scandal”. The Tech giants are pushing this as something that protects consumers. It doesn’t. Rather it protects the very Tech giants that successfully pushed for this bill, passed just yesterday.