Friday, March 21, 2014

Surveillance States and Their Economies

Theresa May summoned the internet giant Yahoo for an urgent meeting on Thursday to raise security concerns after the company announced plans to move to Dublin where it is beyond the reach of Britain's surveillance laws.

By making the Irish capital rather than London the centre of its European, Middle East and Africa operations, Yahoo cannot be forced to hand over information demanded by Scotland Yard and the intelligence agencies through "warrants" issued under Britain's controversial anti-terror laws.

[...]

In February, the Guardian revealed that Britain's eavesdropping centre GCHQ intercepted and stored the images of millions of people using Yahoo webcams, regardless of whether they were suspects. The data included a large quantity of sexually explicit pictures.

The company said this represented "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

[...]

The move to make Dublin the centre of its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) was announced last month and will take effect from Friday.

[...]

Emma Carr, deputy director of Big Brother Watch, said: "It should not come as a surprise if companies concerned about maintaining their users' trust to hold their information start to move to countries with more rigorous oversight processes, particularly where courts oversee requests for information." Surveillance laws have a direct impact on our economy and Yahoo's decision should be ring an alarm in Parliament that ignoring the serious questions about surveillance that are being debated around the world will only harm Britain's digital economy."

  Guardian
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No comments: