International Data Protection

Full Title or Meme

Does any foreign national citizen have ant ability to protect their data held by a foreign company?

After the 2001 9-11 attack against the United States laws were passed to give the NSA complete access to any information that a US based company held about a foreign national.

Caspar Bowden: The Cloud Conspiracy 2008-2014 describes the level of control of NSA on the FISAAA 2008 law that allows secret access by the NSA of any "information with respect to a foreign-based political or foreign territory that relates to the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States" Bowden was Chief Privacy Advisor in Microsoft when he reported this to all the National Technology offices in an intenal high level strategy meeting. Two months later he was fired without cause. It became clear that none of the US based technology companies wanted to discuss the reality of the situation, even internally. There is no reason to expected that the situation is any different in any other country with a national spy organization.

See also the page on Shared Data Protection for some information on how difficult it is to protect data that is held in more that one computer cloud location even when it is legal to do so.