Max Schrems at the Austrian premiere of the documentary film Democracy at Filmcasino in Vienna, Austria). Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.
"If disclosure schedule is (or remains) as promised to us, the police (SPD) shall serve the second installment regarding this case some time later today."The 'Clown Computing' hype (in effect outsourcing) suffered a major blow last week because of Max Schrems (Maximilian). We've already included several links about it (nearly a dozen in total) in several batches of Daily Links. The short story is, for privacy reasons the 'Clown Computing' "products" from the US may be unlawful in a lot of contexts, at least here in Europe. They're not designed to respect certain principles and there's an imperial element to them, putting in jeopardy countries' very autonomy. Espionage troves threaten countries' independence. To challenge this it takes a lot of effort; Schrems told me that these legal battles of his are tiring. He's up against very large law firms with many connections in a lot of institutions. There are billions if not trillions of euros at stake (over the long run).
Here in this site we generally reject 'Clown Computing'. We know who stands to gain from it. It is not too hard to see and to understand this.
As we noted in part 3, Google was already targeted by requests for personal information of Wikileaks staff for having the courage to engage in journalism that exposed war crimes committed by the US Government. It wasn't even a partisan thing; the Obama administration was looking to cover up for what George Bush had done. They did not want the public to see evidence of government corruption and crimes. ⬆