Caspar Bowden spoke at the 31c3 conference. Snippets:
I told my technology officers at MicroSoft that if you sell cloud computing services to your own governments, this means that the NSA can do unlimited surveillance on that data. […] two months later they did fire me.
“Technology officers” represent MicroSoft in their respective countries.
On the “FISA Amendment Act of 2008 (Sec 702)”:
This means if you are not American, you cannot trust U.S. software services!!
Exactly.
The US congress was laughing, laughing at the idea that you have privacy rights. That is the climate of the US privacy debate.
“You”, in that sentence, refers to non-US persons outside the US.
FISAAA offers zero protection to foreigner’s data in US clouds.
US is “exceptionally exceptional”: The number of references in surveillance law that discriminate by citizenship/nationality (NOT geography of communication path), per country:
US: 40, UK: zero, Germany: 1, Canada: 2, New Zeeland: 2, Australia: 2. No others.
On whistleblowers:
We need to give them watertight asylum, and probably some incentives, some rewards. I actually proposed to the parliament [EU parliament] that the whistleblower should get 25% of any fines subsequently exacted.
Big applause from the audience…
How do people know politicians and officials aren’t influenced by fear of NSA spying in their own private life? […] this is highly corrosive to democracy!
Finally:
The thoughts that Edward Snowden has put in the minds of people cannot now be unthought.
What this all means, in practice, relating back to medical applications, is that we (Europeans) can’t use US software or services, which includes medical records such as EPIC, data analysis services such as IMS Health, data storage such as Amazon, Azure, iCloud, backup solutions (unless encrypted client side), or even US operating systems such as Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, a series of embedded OS, etc. At least not if we care about our patient’s right to privacy.