We are the voluntary prisoners of the cloud; we are being watched over by governments we did not elect. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWael Ghonim, Google's Egyptian executive, said: “If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet.”1 But how does one liberate a society that already has the internet? In a society 01/14 permanently connected through pervasive broadband networks, the shared internet is, bit by bit and piece by piece, overshadowed by the “cloud.” The Coming of the Cloud The cloud, as a planetary-scale infrastructure, was first made possible by an incremental rise in Metahaven computing power, server space, and trans- continental fiber-optic connectivity. It is a by- product and parallel iteration of the global Captives of the (information) economy, enabling a digital (social) marketplace on a worldwide scale. Many of the Cloud: Part I cloud’s most powerful companies no longer use the shared internet, but build their own dark fiber highways for convenience, resilience, and speed.2 In the cloud’s architecture of power, the early internet is eclipsed. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊA nondescript diagram in a 1996 MIT research paper titled “The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design,” showed a “cloud” of networks situated between routers linked up by Internet Protocol (IP).3 This was the first reported usage of the term “cloud” in relation to the internet. The paper talked about a “confederation” of networks governed by common protocol. A 2001 New York Times article reported that Microsoft’s .NET software programs did not reside on any one computer, n “but instead exist in the ‘cloud’ of computers e v a that make up the internet.”4 But it wasn’t until h a t 2004 that the notion of “cloud computing” was e M Ê defined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt: 2 1 0 2 r I don’t think people have really understood e b how big this opportunity really is. It starts I m e t t r with the premise that the data services and p a e P architecture should be on servers. We call it s : d u — cloud computing – they should be in a o 7 l 3 C “cloud” somewhere. And that if you have # e l h the right kind of browser or the right kind of t a f n r o access, it doesn’t matter whether you have u s o j e v a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a x i t u l p f BlackBerry or what have you – or new a - e C devices still to be developed – you can get access to the cloud. There are a number of companies that have benefited from that. Obviously, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon come to mind. The computation and the data and so forth are in the servers.5 The internet can be compared to a patchwork of city-states, or an archipelago of islands. User 09.17.12 / 12:42:29 EDT 02/14 A selection of the global US social media cloud, resorting under the Patriot Act. 09.17.12 / 12:42:29 EDT data and content materials are dispersed over cloud is like money in the bank, what happens to different servers, domains, and jurisdictions (i.e., it while it resides “conveniently” in the cloud? different sovereign countries). The cloud is more like Bismarck’s unification of Germany, sweeping The US Cloud and the Patriot Act up formerly distinct elements, bringing them Where and by whom sites are registered and data under a central government. As with most is hosted matters a great deal in determining technology, there is a sense of abstraction from who gains access to and control over the data. prior experiences; in the cloud the user no longer 03/14 For example, all data stored by US companies (or needs to understand how a software program their subsidiaries) in non-US data centers falls works or where his or her data really is. The under the jurisdiction of the USA Patriot Act, an important thing is that it works. anti-terrorism law introduced in 2001.10 This ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn the early 1990s, a user would operate a emphatically includes the entire US cloud – “personal home page,” hosted by an internet Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Dropbox, Google, Service Provider (ISP), usually located in the Amazon, Rackspace, Box, Microsoft, and many country where that user lived. In the early 2000s, others. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George free online services like Blogspot and video sites Washington University, has established that the like YouTube came to equal and surpass the Patriot Act, rather than investigating potential services of local providers. Instead of using a terrorists, is mostly used to spy on innocent paid-for local e-mail account, users would Americans.11 But the people being watched need switch to a service like Gmail. In the late 2000s not even be Americans. Via the cloud, citizens and the early 2010s this was complemented, if across the world are subject to the same Patriot not replaced, by Facebook and other social Act powers – which easily lend themselves to media, which integrate e-mail, instant misuse by authorities. Matthew Waxman of the messaging, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), financial Council on Foreign Relations outlines the services, and other social interaction software situation: within their clouds. Cloud-based book sales, shopping, and e-reading have brought about the These kinds of surveillance powers have global dominance of Amazon, the world’s biggest historically been prone to abuse. Some of cloud storage provider and the “Walmart of the the legal restrictions on surveillance that Web.”6 By 2015, combined spending for public the Patriot Act was designed to roll back and private cloud storage will be $22.6 billion were actually the direct product of abuses worldwide.7 Given this transition, it is no by the FBI, the CIA, and other government exaggeration to proclaim an exodus from the agencies. During the 1960s and ‘70s, internet to the cloud. The internet’s dispersed national security intelligence powers were architecture gives way to the cloud’s central used by government agents to spy on model of data storage and management, handled political opposition [and] cast abusively and owned by a handful of corporations. n wide nets. That legacy of abuse has raised e v ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe coming of the cloud is spelled out by a a lot of concerns about whether there is h a Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, one of t adequate oversight with respect to these e M 12 Silicon Valley's fastest growing cloud storage Ê new surveillance powers. 2 providers. As Levie states, the biggest driver of 1 0 2 the cloud is the ever-expanding spectrum of r The sociologist Saskia Sassen adds to this e mobile devices – iPhones, iPads, Androids, and b perspective: I m e t t such – from which users tap into the cloud and r p a e P flock around its server spine: Through the Patriot Act [...] the government s : d u — has authorized official monitoring of o 7 l 3 C If you think about the market that we're in, attorney-client conversations, wide- # e l and more broadly just the enterprise h ranging secret searches and wiretaps, the t a f n r o software market, the kind of transition collection of Internet and e-mail addressing u s o j e that's happening now from legacy systems v data [...] All of this can be done without x i t u l p to the cloud is literally, by definition, a f probable cause about the guilt of the a - once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is e C people searched – that is to say, the usual probably going to happen at a larger scale threshold that must be passed before the than any other technology transition we've government may invade privacy has been seen in the enterprise. Larger than client neutralized. This is an enormous accrual of servers. Larger than mainframes.8 powers in the administration, which has found itself in the position of having to Google, one of the world’s seven largest cloud reassure the public that it can be 'trusted' companies, has recently compared itself to a not to abuse these powers. But there have bank.9 That comparison is apt. If data in the been abuses.13 09.17.12 / 12:42:29 EDT 04/14 The Mubarak “kill switch” which took Egypt off the internet in January, 2011. 09.17.12 / 12:42:29 EDT Twitter played the role of subversive, Microsoft was the first cloud company to publicly uncensorable alternative media – in part confirm Patriot Act access to its data stored because the servers of these wildly popular outside the US.14 In August 2011, Google also services were beyond the reach of local confirmed that its data stored overseas is authorities. Indeed, Hosni Mubarak's best bet to subject to “lawful access” by the US fend off the power of the internet was to switch it government.15 A 2012 white paper by the law and off entirely. To do so, “just a few phone calls privacy firm Hogan Lovells examined these 05/14 probably sufficed.”19 While Mubarak's ultima findings, concluding that while the Patriot Act ratio as a sovereign ruler over Egyptian soil does give the US government access to the proved sufficient to wall the country off from the cloud, many other governments enjoy similar network, the violent crudeness of this act also forms of access under their own laws – and demonstrated the dictator's much more further, that using the “location” of a cloud substantial lack of power over the network's server to determine legal protection was a larger infrastructure.
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