So the Brits on the Independent's site think NSA is searching clouds...

[grasswire]

...for the documents. Check out this post from over there:

"It was suggested that inside Number 10, Sir Jeremy had been tasked with warning The Guardian of the “dangers of holding highly sensitive information on insecure servers [computers] that could damage Britain.” "

Obviously they wanted the material uploaded onto the cloud. It is no coincidence that every single major cloud storage provider has gone down in the past two days. That's Google's cloud storage, Microsoft's cloud storage, Intel's cloud services and Amazon's (the biggest and used by a huge number of other providers from Dixons and Dropbox to Spotify). Remember these services are supposed to have a 99.999% availability yet they've all failed with one day of each other. Not a single word of explanation from any of the companies involved - obviously they've been legally gagged by the NSA. I think their entire contents is being trawled through in the hope of finding uploaded documents. Obviously Amazon would be the difficult one because it sells it facilities to so many heterogeneous third parties. The data probably had to be copied and examined - which would have taken much longer.

[longship]

1. Clouds? Those are chemtrails!!!

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

[bunnies]

2. lol

Well played.

[Blue_In_AK]

10. That's so funny.

My first thought, too.

[woo me with science]

14. LOL. I was trying to imagine someone from 50 years ago

trying to make sense of that headline.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. I hope the NSA enjoys the rough drafts

[Arctic Dave]

4. Our company never went to a cloud storage just for this reason.

It just seemed so crazy to put your sensitive data and not so sensitive data on some unknown server.

It was like handing all your money to a stranger.

[Blue_In_AK]

11. I agree.

I was even apprehensive about putting my innocuous photos out there. Somebody might not like my protest pictures. That's why I got a couple of mongo hard drives.

[mick063]

5. This is extremely important information

for those that wish to describe the magnitude of the intense desperation by the US Government.

There is some damaging information out there that they really, really fear. They have to be terrified to shut down the cloud. You cannot convince me that Yemen Al Qaeda warrants such desperate measures.

For our sake, I hope there are copies being mass produced and distributed world wide.

[grasswire]

7. exactly

I have no idea of the difficulty of searching like that, but just the shutting down of those commercial enterprises to do it is extremely significant.

I wonder....I wonder....if they ever consider shutting down the Internets to get what they want.

[woo me with science]

15. +1000000

This is abject terror.

[DirkGently]

6. Entirely possible. The panic is obviously increasing. n/t

[unconvinced]

8. Links?

Anyone have links to confirm the news about Intel, Microsoft and Google?

I already knew about Amazon but find nothing on the other 3.

[Turborama]

9. Here's the link to the article the OP omitted to add...

It was suggested that inside Number 10, Sir Jeremy had been tasked with warning The Guardian of the “dangers of holding highly sensitive information on insecure servers [computers] that could damage Britain.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nick-clegg-backs-david-cameron-as-pm-sends-cabinet-secretary-sir-jeremy-heywood-to-warn-guardian-over-edward-snowden-documents-8777216.html

Here are some articles I found about the outages (nothing about Intel going down, though):

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2046972/businesses-shouldnt-let-google-and-microsoft-outages-shake-their-confidence-in-the-cloud.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047055/despite-recent-cloud-service-outages-security-a-bigger-concern-than-availability.html


Linking them to the last paragraph of the Independent's article is interesting speculation by the author of the OP.


Welcome to DU.

[Egalitarian Thug]

12. And once again, for the thousandth time or so, we told you so.

Cloud security, or any variation thereof, is an oxymoron.

Why won't you listen? We invented all of this. We designed it to be open and accessible. The rules that make it all possible also make it impossible to lock up. For fuck's sake, what is it that you people don't get about this?

A chapter title from one of my books; "If you wouldn't paint it on the side of your house, don't put it out on the internet".

[PopeOxycontinI]

13. Aw, shucks...

When I started hearing about this "cloud" shit a few years ago, I figured it's very purpose
was for more surveillance. For just 9.99/mo we'll "protect" your data. my ass! Get a goddamn
backup hard drive people! I'm not the least bit surprised they could also shut down the whole system
to let the NSA look for stuff...probably the whole point from the get go!