Collateral Damage from NSA surveillance: Copyrights and Patents?

[Katashi_itto]

Think of it this way

If European and Amercian companies, innovators and such, are using the internet to transfer data and critical information. It all gets vacumed up by NSA into the hands of private contractors and others.

That vital data, is now able to be looked at copied, sold or put in the hands whomever.

At a certain point, what is the incentive for anyone to look at patents/copyrights with any legitmacy ?

It would seem, the those who have the most to lose in all this are the biggest and most powerful companies in the world, whose secret proprietary information is now surely stored somewhere in an NSA database.
Corporate spies have now become obsolete.
All you need is a contact inside NSA and cash.

[RevStPatrick]

1. I'll try to find it... But I saw an article yesterday that I was waiting for...

European companies are shying away from using "Cloud" storage, particularly provided by American companies. Saw that coming a mile away. Next we will see European companies deciding they just don't want to do business in the U.S. at all.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. The web will fracture soon

And you watch the US slam feet and fists as it does

[snooper2]

11. you got a date for this?

Still waiting on "empire collapse" timeframe-

This is a new one- The "web will fracture"

LOL, Do I have a 10G interface in my network somewhere that is going to go down and VRRP won't kick in?



Here's a good tutorial so you can say you learned something new today

[Katashi_itto]

7. Europe is considering building their own Internet now...

[snooper2]

12. LOL

I love the entertainment DU provides

[hughee99]

14. Ah the cloud...

I can't imagine that someone would be uncomfortable putting personal, private or proprietary information located god knows where and managed by god knows who. I suspect the enormous NSA data warehouse they're building in UTAH is intended to be much of the cloud's back end. If the NSA were the organization that's managing the cloud servers, they won't have to steal or intercept people's information, the people will be willingly sending info to them. As an added bonus, they can SELL this service, so the very people they spy on are paying for it, too.

[frazzled]

2. Well, there's an easy fix for that

The US Postal Service (or if you prefer, a private company such as FedEx or UPS).

I'm not trying to be cute here, but whether there is an NSA data collection program or not, or even no private contractors involved with government technology, there is always the possibility that some government secretary or intern logging or printing out patent/copyright data for the agency, or one of the many government workers involved with the process, could use the information contained within for insider trading or to sell to a Chinese company.

There is no such thing as a secure system, and there never has been. I just finished reading a novel by Zola about the Haussmanization of Paris during the Second Empire (1852-72). It's about the crazy insider graft and corruption during that massive government building project. The main character makes his fortune by getting a job with a government department that is planning all the revitalization, and he digs in drawers and elsewhere to find the proposals so he can buy up property that will be expropriated, selling it to fictional buyers for ever-increasing prices till the government pays him millions on the dollar to buy it up.

I understand that technology expands the number of people able to access data. But it doesn't have to come through the data-storage system. Anonymous hackers have proven time and again that they have the ability to hack into corporate or financial sites and get whatever they want.

[Katashi_itto]

4. Thats not an easy fix. That slows down innovation to a crawl.

The company I own is entirely online. Our confrences, our documents, everything is online. My Business partners are in Kansas City, Japan, UK and I am in New Orleans.

Yeah, not possible to "fedex" everything. Not to mention the sheer cost.

We would literally be unable to respond quickly to anything.

[frazzled]

8. How do you protect yourself against hackers?

Putting all your business online (which I, too, do ... though nobody is interested in what I do, so it's not an issue)* is a technological issue with respect to privacy. The government is probably less interested than your average criminal hacker in getting your documents.

I don't think you misunderstood the point of my post. It's not a suggestion to mail or FedEx everything. It was to point out that the technology of the Internet is not secure from criminal intrusion, any government issues aside. We have chosen to avail ourselves of the Internet, the Cloud, digital transactions, etc. Our bank accounts, our business documents, everything is up for grabs from any 19-year-old hacker with the initiative and skill (or from foreign interests). We need to deal with the technological safeguards, not be blaming the government for everything.

When you come up with an example of the US government or one of its contractors harming your business or that of another, I'll change my position. Right now, the question is how we tame this monster of technology we have created. It just keeps getting worse. Read today's front-page NYT article extolling the new predictive search apps:

A range of start-ups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search — new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it. Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting, or where it was.

How does the phone know? Because an application has read your e-mail, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.

The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first that is tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require people to enter a search query. Your context — location, time of day and digital activity — is the query, say the engineers who build these services.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/technology/apps-that-know-what-you-want-before-you-do.html?hp&_r=0

People clamor over these stupid things, willingly giving Google the right to scan their emails .... and then they worry about the government getting access? You've got to wonder what people are THIMKING.

** I am a editor of art books, and many of my clients are in Europe. In the old days they used to send physical proofs via 2-day Fed-Ex for me to mark up and return by 2-day Fed-Ex. Cumbersome, time-consuming, and very expensive. Now, of course, they send me huge PDFs of the books via a large-data service, and all my work is done online and sent back. Of course the government or some evil art-historian wishing to get the advance lowdown on some obscure art exhibition might steal this stuff on route. I doubt anyone cares enough.

[Katashi_itto]

9. Oh no I understood, and agree. But we arent major targets, plus

we take steps to protect ourselves. However I am under no illusions that our protection methods couldnt be broken by NSA or, say a determined hacker for that matter.

Plus like you I don't think anyone is really interested in what we do.

Our not being targets doesnt make it any better that my 4th amendment rights have been thrown out the window.

What is under attack is the whole concept of copyrights/patents. New processes, new technologies can anything discussed or touched via internet is likely sitting in an NSA database.

[Trillo]

5. I've been considering the possibility that the database, in its entirety, should be entirely open.

but to your point, lets say you're an inventor, who emails some colleagues about your project. Next thing you know, one of the big corporations is selling what you've been working on. I don't know if it would be as brazen as loading up with cash, since the big corporations are quite likely part of the corporate-to-NSA information flow, thus it's unreasonable to believe the information doesn't also flow from NSA-to-corporate. We simply don't know, and we can't believe what those who do know, say, as their job description undoubtedly requires public deception.

We do know there are lots of databases, I'm sure I just read an article about faulty FBI databases with bad information, and credit reports with faulty information are often alleged ubiquitous.

[RC]

6. Gee, I bet no one ever thought of that.

So much is being filed under "What Could Possibly Go wrong?", nobody will be able to find anything in the coming chaos.

[LondonReign2]

10. Hell, you don't need a contact within the NSA

All you need is a contact within Booz Allen.

All that cash from selling access makes for a fat corporate bottom line.

[Katashi_itto]

13. Good point. Hell Booz Allen is setting up an identical NSA system for the Saudis

Besides it's profitable!

http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/06/booz-allen-most-profitable-spying.html