Canada Quietly Offering Sanctuary To Data From the US

davecb writes "The Toronto Star's lead article today is Canada courting U.S. web giants in wake of NSA spy scandal, an effort to convince them their customer data is safer here. This follows related moves like Cisco moving R&D to Toronto. Industry Canada will neither confirm nor deny that European and U.S. companies are negotiating to move confidential data away from the U.S. This critically depends on recent blocking legislation to get around cases like U.S. v. Bank of Nova Scotia, where U.S. courts 'extradited' Canadian bank records to the U.S. Contrary to Canadian law, you understand ..."

You Know They'll Roll Over!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the Canadians will roll over on you, eh?

Canada is already America's bitch.

[robot_love]

Our banks will release all personal information to US law enforcement, even though this directly contravenes our Constitution.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-banks-to-be-compelled-to-share-clients-info-with-u-s-1.2437975 [www.cbc.ca]

Re:Canada is already America's bitch.

[MrKevvy]

Canada also assisted the NSA in spying [www.cbc.ca] including spying on attendees at the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010.

As this is common knowledge, I'm skeptical that any entity would trust Canada more than the U.S. with its confidential data. I certainly wouldn't.

Re:Not Meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am exchanging data between Canada and any other place but the US, why would it traverse the US?

Because of the way the internet works.

The shortest, fastest network connection between two points isn't always geographically the shortest.

A connection between a computer in Montreal and a computer in Toronto might transit a network in New York or Chicago, because those pipes are bigger, faster & cheaper.

Although, given the Snowden leaks, there may be increased interest in routing internet traffic within the country.

Re:Crazy

[Nerdfest]

In other countries they must actually do 'spying' though, as opposed to just forcing companies to hand over data under threat.

Five Eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA [wikipedia.org]

Spoiler alert: Canada is one of them.

Totally irrelevant if you're a "US company"...

[BUL2294]

So unless Google, Facebook, and the like are no longer going to be US-based companies (which I doubt will happen, especially given that they are publicly traded), and decide to shut down all operations in the US, things like the Patriot Act & wiretapping laws would still compel these companies to hand over data, despite the data center sitting on Canadian soil--or anywhere else in the world... Remember that Microsoft refused to answer questions about whether law enforcement had backdoors into Skype calls, after M$ picked up Skype. Pre-takeover, when Skype was an Estonian company, US-required backdoors didn't exist & couldn't be compelled, so the NSA had to hack to get the data...

Re:You Know They'll Roll Over!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be worse for US to store their data in Canada because at that point, NSA is just spying on another country rather than in their own turf. Something that is in high scrutiny at the moment.

The seems to be spying on their own turf as well, so I don't see that there's much of a difference. :/

Also, given that both countries are part of the Five Eyes collective, I think they're less likely to go into Canadian territory (at least not without asking). They'd probably just get CSEC to do the work instead.