5d ago

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds - Bert Hubert's writings

berthub.eu It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds - Bert Hubert's writings

The very short version: it is madness to continue transferring the running of European societies and governments to American clouds. Not only is it a terrible idea given the kind of things the “King of America” keeps saying, the legal sophistry used to justify such transfers, like the nonsense lette...

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3d ago

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds - Bert Hubert's writings

berthub.eu /articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

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boramalper @lemmy.world

5d ago

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds

berthub.eu /articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

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Europe @lemmy.ml

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5d ago

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds - Bert Hubert's writings

berthub.eu /articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

256 27

25 comments

Never had been.
You just now figured this out?
- There's always been a risk, but now that risk is actually playing out. It's a bit smug to pretend that nothing has changed.
  Not to mention that Bert Hubert has been beating this drum for a long time. However, he also sees that there is more momentum now to actually affect change, which involves latching onto changing circumstances.
  Pretending that things are the same as ever only leads to a defeatist attitude, where people conclude that apparently it's worked so far, might as well continue doing it.

Which idiot is responsible for the "no longer"?
- Well clearly people thought it was previously.
- America and Europe have been supposedly allied since WW2. That’s “no longer” the case, now more obvious than ever before.
- Protections and laws don't stop anything. The NSA, CIA, FBI and whatever other three letter agency will still have their fingers deep into any cloud, any software and any hardware from the US.
- AWS and Azure kind of kneecapped all the other cloud providers

What the hell is a government doing using someone else's cloud? I have a small business and I bought a Synology NAS years ago. How is it possible that a government does not have its own servers?
- Buying service level agreements on rented hardware is easier and cheaper (you don't have to pay your own IT). Security and data protection, pfft nobody needs or wants that.
  
  you don’t have to post your own IT
  Now you’re paying for devops…
- Yeah, that just doesn't scale. Don't get me wrong, what you do works and is good, but you (probably) don't have an off site backup or 100TB of customer data, that is needed in 17 countries accessed by over 15.000 employees.
  I'm not saying, that you need a public cloud provider for that, there are other companies, that do these kinds of things, but it is more comfortable and as with SAP no manager has ever been fired for proposing using Microsoft.
  
  It’s not like we don’t have datacenters and server providers in the eu. We have hetzner, OVH and Aruba (ew)
- What the hell is a government doing using someone else’s cloud?
  Fucking up everything. Thar's what governments do for a living,

As a cloud professional in the US he is 100% right. They should be worried.
- Care to elaborate?
  
  Without too much detail, all heads of US cloud providers sat behind trump at the inauguration.

So China was right in not relying on US big tech

Tried to explain that to the higher ups in my org for months.
They introduced some proxy/VPN that pipes all of our traffic through a service that is not only breaking SSL, but also owned by a US corporation.
That's enough red flags to make Mao blush, but nobody saw any problem in it....
- Care to elaborate for someone that is not in tech? Does twingate fall in that category?
  
  Let's say you open Youtube (or any other site) in your browser. Normally, that connection is encrypted end2end, so only Youtube and you see what data is being sent. An outside observer (your employer, your ISP, etc) might deduce from the network traffic that you're accessing YT, and how long/how much data, but nothing else.
  This encryption is based on SSL/TLS, in a small nutshell, that works by having a chain of cryptographically signed certificates, that proof to you, that YT is really YT, and not someone else (your employer, for example). Attacks like this are called Man in the Middle (MITM). The certificate chain however, needs an anchor. Somewhere to start. These are called Root CA (certifying authorities). Typically these are dedicated companies or large ISPs. Their certificates (the public parts) are stored on your device from the factory (more or less). And thus your device can verify the entire chain of trust from the certificate YT send you down to the RootCA..
  Now, if someone would install a new RootCA certificate on your device, than that entity could become a Man in the Middle, it acts as a relay for all of the traffic going out of your device, can read everything send over the wire - and your device wouldn't even know it. If that entity would be part of a US company, they would be legally forced to hand over all their data to NSA, FBI, etc. even if the actual data transfer woud happen completely within Europe.
  This is exactly what Twingate seems to do. Crowdstrike and ZScaler are similar products.
  The underlying problem here is that IT security in large organizations doesn't mean "How can we be secure?", but "How can we make a legal argument that we did nothing wrong?". So security clusterfucks like this can be implementend, since the CTO can claim not to have been negligent.
  PS: The description above is obviously very simplified, the Wiki articles for SSL/TLS are much better.

The cloud is a tool of oppression in the wrong hands, and it is in the wrong hands.
Let the sun shine in.

25 comments