Ireland’s alarmingly modest data protection platform is causing damage

Impetus

Every picture tells a story. Ireland’s lack of commitment to data privacy is an insult to Europe. And it makes the Irish state look like a super ejit. And an embarrassment to thinking people in Ireland. A backdoor on the backstreet of data theft, tolerated by the dozy EU.

Ireland misses business opportunities as a result of this incompetence. Eg Microsoft moving to Frankfurt, where data protection is taken more seriously, because MS feel the need for marketing purposes. Cloud companies need security credibility to sell their services. Something that is totally missing in Ireland. With its police state, non-standard “postcode” system, unique to each household/business to facilitate data theft, fraud, and data base joins to allow data thieves to put two and two together. Next they will be forcing every Visa/MC cardholder to publish their Irish card number, name, expiry date and CVV on a website. And they will cry “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about”.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/12/after-safe-harbour-ruling-legal-moves-to-force-facebook-to-stop-sending-data-to-us/

A good movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139328/?ref_=nv_sr_1 Ghost Writer. Featuring "Tony Blair" (which had to be filmed in Sylt and Berlin (pretending to be a US island and London) because Tony (who was instrumental with Bush) in their government's million odd murders of innocent people in Iraq and the deliberate destruction of data privacy. Becuase film director Roman Polanski could not visit the terrorist governed states of GB or USA - forcing him to slum it out in Switzerland/Germany to live and conduct his film making business. Liberal states (ie non-culchie jurisdictions) that protect one's data and freedom of expression.

_Tombstone_

Impetus wrote: »

Ireland misses business opportunities as a result of this incompetence. Eg Microsoft moving to Frankfurt, where data protection is taken more seriously, because MS feel the need for marketing purposes.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/11/11/1354222/microsoft-putting-servers-in-germany-to-keep-user-data-away-from-us-intelligence

Read the comments, Microsoft have made it easier than ever for everything to be scooped up.

Impetus

_Tombstone_ wrote: »

http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/11/11/1354222/microsoft-putting-servers-in-germany-to-keep-user-data-away-from-us-intelligence

Read the comments, Microsoft have made it easier than ever for everything to be scooped up.

The world needs a neutral data platform. One where each attempt to "snoop" is decided by an independent court system, based on reasonable evidence of a crime. While Germany and similar have lots of data privacy regulations, if the DE system allows the Anglo Saxon global terrorist/domination states to monitor Angela Merkel's mobile phone, as Hamlet/Marcellus said, "something is rotten in the state of Denmark".

Having said that, Ireland remains at the bottom of the heap with its culchie dominated arrangements. (Nothing herein should be construed as anti-decentralisation).

Irish law needs to change in favour of the innocent party and mass monitoring. An action which in legal terms = guilty until proven innocent.

Ireland can't continue to host Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon AWS etc while the regulatory regime is so incompetently structured.

A real working data privacy protection platform would give Ireland a competitive advantage. Today's non-system makes Ireland look idiotic and a badly administered country. Which probably is a reflection of the reality of the country generally. Run by politicians who have never lived in a well administered state. Not to mention their permanent government "underlings" - who seem to really run the show. Over-paid, over-pentioned. Incompetent. Insular. Linguistically clueless - who can't do anything better than copying Anglo-Saxon concepts which are for the most part corrupt and anti-most constitutions on the planet.

FSL

Why the indignation? Surely anyone with a modicum of sense knew that from day one of the internet everything would be scooped up by the 'intelligence' services. To an extent it has prevented a major conflict between so called super powers as each has known exactly what the others were doing.

Anyone wishing to make private communication whether it be legitimate business, non banal personal or nefarious activities knows quite well the necessity of using one time encryption.

I realised at a very early age as a volunteer in a general election campaign that all the candidates were really interested in was getting elected so they could dip their snouts in the trough.

anvilfour

FSL wrote: »

Why the indignation? Surely anyone with a modicum of sense new that from day one of the internet everything would be scooped up by the 'intelligence' services. To an extent it has prevented a major conflict between so called super powers as each has known exactly what the others were doing.

Anyone wishing to make private communication whether it be legitimate business, non banal personal or nefarious activities knows quite well the necessity of using one time encryption.

I realised at a very early age as a volunteer in a general election campaign that all the candidates were really interested in was getting elected so they could dip their snouts in the trough.

Hi FSL,

I agree that expecting privacy for your data stored on the public internet (especially on sites like Facebook!) is it a bit unreasonable but am curious what you mean by "one time encryption" - do you mean OTR (Off the Record) messaging? I am a big fan!

Or do you mean encrypting data with a One Time Pad? (Theoretically 100% secure but very difficult to enforce!).

FSL

Hi anvilfour yes I mean using a key the same size as the message and never repeating it. That's perfect for secure communication between a small group e.g. people collaborating on a commercially sensitive project.

It also has the added advantage that for any given message there are so many possible keys that the message can be decrypted to any string the size of the message that ever has or ever will be written.

So if the message is something you would not want any third party to see then you can easily generate a second key which will decrypt it to something totally bland.

anvilfour

FSL wrote: »

Hi anvilfour yes I mean using a key the same size as the message and never repeating it. That's perfect for secure communication between a small group e.g. people collaborating on a commercially sensitive project.

It also has the added advantage that for any given message there are so many possible keys that the message can be decrypted to any string the size of the message that ever has or ever will be written.

So if the message is something you would not want any third party to see then you can easily generate a second key which will decrypt it to something totally bland.

FSL,

An excellent suggestion - I think that the old arguments about it being difficult to exchange keys are fast becoming redundant as a 1TB drive filled with random data would be enough to exchange secure messages for years...

Of course it may not protect you from a full on NSA shakedown if messages are decrypted or OTP's are generated on a compromised machine or the courier exchanging your keys is compromised.

You'd also need a very good source of entropy to be sure your numbers were random - perhaps it would be best to use an actual bingo machine or a few ten sided dice to generate your numbers and actually write them down on paper?

This would have the added advantage that you could destroy each sheet as it is used, as you're supposed to when using an OTP, which wouldn't be as easy to do with data on a hard drive.

FSL

anvilfour wrote: »

FSL,

a 1TB drive filled with random data would be enough to exchange secure messages for years...

1TB equivalent to 205579.5 copies of War and Peace in kindle format.

Impetus

FSL wrote: »

Why the indignation? Surely anyone with a modicum of sense knew that from day one of the internet everything would be scooped up by the 'intelligence' services. To an extent it has prevented a major conflict between so called super powers as each has known exactly what the others were doing.

Anyone wishing to make private communication whether it be legitimate business, non banal personal or nefarious activities knows quite well the necessity of using one time encryption.

I realised at a very early age as a volunteer in a general election campaign that all the candidates were really interested in was getting elected so they could dip their snouts in the trough.

Surely therefore the most simple politician can see the economic value of providing data protection to the world? It is no different to back in the day when they had manual telephone exchanges the (usually) she who ran the local village post office knew virtually everything. In that case we were talking about a hundred or so phone customers. If politicians don't want to distance themselves from info / data theft, they are a corrupt bunch. We have a court system to provide considered access in the case of criminality.