Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 155

the environment or marching against more pipelines to the United States
should expect their communication stored in U.S. company cloud systems
to be subject to investigation without any recourse, even if they did know,
which they most likely would not, that such investigations were taking
place. The head of one of the largest advocacy groups in Canada con-
cluded, “It does indicate for many who take advocacy positions that they
really need to be very cautious about what they're doing for the want of
saving a few dollars,” and counsels against outsourcing computer services
to U.S. cloud-computing companies (ibid.). Although Canadian federal
and provincial governments have put in place privacy protection measures,
most experts agree, according to a journalist with the leading newspaper
in Canada's capital, that “the FISA Amendment Act overrides any privacy
and data protection offered by third-party vendors, international agree-
ments on data transfers and Canadian domestic legal protections” (ibid.).
There is little hope of removing FISA in the near future because the
U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision supported by both its conserva-
tive majority and the Obama administration, ruled against plaintiffs
who challenged its constitutionality. In what has been described as the
catch-22 of FISA and other laws intended to combat terrorism, the Court
majority argued that opponents of the law could not demonstrate that it
would harm them. However, since this and other laws of its type keep all
warrantless surveillance secret, to the point of preventing service provid-
ers from notifying customers, it is impossible to demonstrate the law's
speciic harm (Liptak 2013). As one law professor determined, “The
coalition could not challenge our secret surveillance laws because they are
secret. There is no one who can complain of his or her rights having been
violated, because anyone whose rights have been violated doesn't know
it. That's the catch when it comes to assessing the legality of the govern-
ment's secret activities” (Calo 2013). It is therefore likely that signiicant
concerns about privacy and security will continue to face providers and
users of cloud computing well into the future.
Working (or Not) in the Cloud
Each year Fortune magazine produces a list of the top one hundred com-
panies in the United States to work for. It covers the range of objective