Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 154

Teachers (CAUT), which explained the privacy consequences of going with
the Google system. Under the university's existing email system, U.S. law
enforcement authorities, intelligence services, and corporations do not have
direct access to communication, unless it passes entirely through a server
located in the United States. Furthermore, the cooperation of Canadian
authorities is important, if not essential, in making the judgment call
about pursuing intercepts. With Gmail, all email—including messages,
attachments, links, and any transaction data—is subject to the provisions
of the PATRIOT Act and FISA. Neither a warrant, nor probable cause, nor
even suspicion of criminality is required to permit intercepts. Government
authorities would simply have the right to scoop up most of what scholars
consider the exercise of academic freedom. Moreover, corporations like
Google are required to comply with government requests for email and
associated communication and are prohibited from informing the target
that such a request has been made (Turk 2013). For Canadian universities
like York, this means weighing major cost savings against the threats to
the security and privacy of its students, faculty, and staff. 5
These conclusions received the complete support of Microsoft's chief
privacy oficer, who, in a submission to the European Parliament, deter-
mined that all U.S. cloud-computing companies, including Microsoft,
were subject to the surveillance and investigatory powers outlined by
CAUT. Speciically, he asserted, “it is lawful in the U.S. to conduct
purely political surveillance on foreigners' data accessible in U.S. clouds”
(MacLeod 2013). He notes that FISA in particular provides broad sur-
veillance powers directed at “foreign-based political organization(s) . . .
or foreign territory that relates to . . . conduct of the foreign affairs of the
United States.” The cloud is singled out in 2008 amendments that, in
addition to permitting “warrantless wiretapping,” give the go-ahead to
investigate communication contained in “remote computing”—that is,
the cloud (ibid.). In an interview with a Canadian newspaper, the Micro-
soft oficial concluded that the U.S. government “for the irst time [has]
created a power of mass-surveillance speciically targeted at the data of
non-U.S. persons located outside the U.S., which applies to cloud comput-
ing” (ibid.). He called the U.S. legislation a “grave risk” to European data
security and told the Canadian newspaper “everything I've said about the
situation of Europeans applies also to Canadians” (ibid.). For example,
Canadian organizations mobilizing against energy projects that threaten