Comment by clairity
4 years ago
i’d support any legislation that booted google, fb, ms, adobe, salesforce, and a whole host of other surveillance tech companies from any and all levels of government. it’s literally as important as the separation of church and state. in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones, in all facets of civic life (e.g., campaign finance).
This is just naive. Government offices/agencies are so tightly coupled with packages like office 365 that forcefully separating them would require home built solutions which would always be terrible, less secure, and more expensive to the tax payer. There’s a lot of good these products can provide, granted they are properly audited and have high security requirements.
Idk here in France there are cities and state-wide administrations with free/libre stacks based on Linux, LibreOffice, Zimbra and others and things seem to JustWork™. For instance the french Gendarmerie, the cities of Rennes and Arles...
Arles is getting suckered by Microsoft, sadly [1]. Unfortunately all it takes is one idiot to get in office once to kill this kind of successful initiative that has been running for almost two decades.
[1]: https://larlesienne.info/2022/02/22/la-municipalite-de-carol...
Are there any high functioning large companies that use Linux/LibreOffice/Zimbra? I suppose governments rarely aspire to be high functioning.
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> would require home built solutions which would always be terrible, less secure,
I disagree. It would be relatively straightforward to build such systems on Linux and open source.
> and more expensive to the tax payer
As a proportion of Italy's GDP, the cost would be negligible, especially given that this is a matter of national security, something governments tend to be keen to spend money on.
> As a proportion of Italy's GDP, the cost would be negligible
After how many failed rewrites that never deliver a working product?
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I didn’t read it as government can’t use commercial products. Just that the corps couldn’t influence politics. But I’m not the OP, so I can’t speak to what was intended.
More around the storing of data. This is why Scale8.com is on EU servers...
> are so tightly coupled with packages like office 365
Are they though? Do you know this for a fact? I mean, sure, MS Office is very popular in government settings, but does this really go beyond the possibility of just replacing it with LibreOffice if they so decided?
Sharing a link to a document that others can edit in the cloud is much more convenient than emailing around a _final_v3(2).docx document.
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I obviously can’t speak for all, even most, but back in my consulting days I can say the many US federal and state agencies use Azure AD and a litany of AWS services that are core to vital work streams. Enough that having to shut them down would neuter the department.
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Most developed countries have several offices/agencies that already run 'home built' solutions, they just don't get talked about much.
They get talked about incessantly at the local Microsoft HQ.
your whole argument is based on the assumption that proprietary software is superior in every single metric. thats just patently false.
ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.
there are a number of other office suites that are entirely adequate for bureaucratic organizations to build methodical processes around (which is what bureaucracies do). the capabilities of the underlying tools don’t matter much in this regard.
also, audits aren’t meant to prove anything (like security), but instead to shift liability.
> ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.
An ad hominem means using an insult as the basis for rejecting an argument, e.g. 'that is wrong because you are [attack]'. Saying an argument is naive and then explaining why is not an ad hominem.
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> ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.
GP never says that you’re naive, but the comment was.
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The average large organization uses over 100 SaaS products
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s...
I would love to see you replace all 100 of those with open source software.
Have you ever dealt with large technology migrations?
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Russia has that. Just typewriters and stationary.
Sounds like it would create jobs too, that's a plus not a minus lol
"Creating jobs" to inefficiently solve a solved task is not a good thing, it is society burning it's tax income. It is only good to create jobs when the output of those jobs is increased value.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
less secure? can it get worse than ms, outlook and active directory foo? they incepted their own industry around their unsecurity, lol.
terrible and more expensive is also a joke, but not as big, you still could got to ibm or oracle if you want to pay more for less, admitted
The legal and moral question is one of data sovereignty, not tools vendor. I suggest the GP comment be read with that context in mind.
Rubbish, there has been a concertive effort by the US to undermine other countries including so called NATO allies in order to dominate the world, its been going of for decades.
I refuse to use the NHS here in the UK because of the widespread use of Microsoft everywhere.
> in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones
I don't think you comprehend the scope of what you're suggesting.
I work for a school district and I'm currently migrating our system from using one commercial bus routing service to another... using Windows, SQL Server, Teams, etc. from Microsoft... using a laptop, dock, three monitors, keyboard, and mouse from HP... and today the elevator was broken so we called a repair company to come fix it... oh, and some company makes the school buses, and the networked phone on my desk, and the printer around the corner, and all of the paper in it... the fluorescent bulbs above me don't grow on trees...
you can't just expect governments, even at the national level, to roll their own everything without interfacing with corporations in any way—this is a hopelessly naïve view of the world. I am just as uncomfortable as you are with data being shared with corporations, but you're going to have to figure out a more realistic set of political goals than what you've outlined here.
it's not really aimed at governments, so much as corporations that feel entitled to sneak in ancillary interests into their products, like surveilling the public. basically, it's to force companies like microsoft to remove all that other shit and provide just the core software, if they want access to government largess. this has beneficial externalities for us, the residents of said governments.
sure, and like I said, I agree completely. but you can't just say "i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones", unless you're proposing that all corporations should be state-owned and -operated, and that's not really a viable solution, plus it introduces a whole host of other problems.
but even if you just mean to say "government should not share citizens' data with corporations", well, there are presently two (until our license with one is up at the end of summer) separate corporations that both know where every kid in my school district lives, what their special ed needs are, what their parents names are, what their parents' contact information is, if they live between multiple households, and so forth, because that is the explicit purchase of their business, and that why we purchased their software. the same goes for another piece of SaaS we recently purchased a license to involving food service management for the school system. when designing the data export we opted to not follow the part of the schema that wants SSNs for the students (because why would they need that?!), but that might not be the case for other districts using the same software.
my point is there are a lot more interconnected corporate software services sharing citizen data at play in contemporary government systems than you probably think, and, once again, even though I agree with your position with regards to sharing citizen data with corporations... I think that ship might've pretty much sailed sometime in the past few decades.
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How far does "separating corporate interests from governmental ones" go?
Can the government purchase a car? Hire a private corporation to build a road? Hire a consulting company to check the security of their (now-free-and-without-a-support-contract FOSS?) computer setup?
It's actually quite simple. The government can buy things services from specific providers, but it cannot force you to buy services from specific providers. In other words, it can buy BMWs for government use, but it cannot say "you have to buy a BMW to enter the municipal office".
The same applies to websites. If a government website uses Google analytics, it is essentially requiring you to do business with a specific company (in this case Google) in order to use a government service.
And if the government uses Cloudflare or GoDaddy or aws it’s requiring you to do business with those companies. This goal is impossible to achieve with any government run service.
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> cannot force you to buy services from specific providers
But government can impose requirements, like TAA compliance (1) and SHB requirements (2) on its service vendors, forcing those vendors to purchase from a fairly constrained number of hardware providers.
https://www.dtra.mil/Portals/61/Documents/Business%20Docs/ev...
https://www.afcea.org/site/sites/default/files/files/2-ColLi...
If the government takes your data and runs an analysis on an old IBM mainframe, are they forcing you to do business with IBM?
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Could you expand on the definition of "doing business with" an entity that you're using here? It seems quite non-standard.
If you open the door to a govt office, are you doing business with the company who installed the doors? If you use the toilet, are you doing business with the company that janitorial services are contracted out to?
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This analogy does not apply.
The gov. is using some service and therefore some citizen data is subject to the T&C's and that's it.
If Google were a German or UK company it would be the same thing - everyone subject to those T&C's.
The gov is forcing me to pay the crony corporations through taxing me
Can the government own a BMW bus?
The issue (per original article) is one of data sovereignty, and I’d identify a sibling concern of adopting open data formats.
If those are sacrosanct, the choice of tools vendor matters far less.
where to draw the line is a fair question in any policy debate, and one i'd expect to draw plenty of lively discussion. it's pretty clear to me that surveillance tech is on the outside of that line, but i'm open to reasonable arguments otherwise.
They tried with the church and did not succeed. Why do you think they can succeed with SW.
FWIW I think the "church and state" analogy is genius, it totally resonated with me. I'm going to steal that!
Not only state... I see absolutely 0 reason for my swiss ebanking in the secured web interface to se google analytics and similar trackers. I can clearly see them being blocked by the likes of ublock origin and ghostery in my firefox. Why the f*k should google know where I go in such private matters (and there are tons more, ie if you are lgbtq+ in one of the many restrictive locations, have some less mainstream political preferences etc.). The data once acquired have no reason to be deleted, ever. Too juicy info, and 7 billion humans is not that large group to aspire to track.
I get why google et al want it for their growth/sales, but they are a private entity not owning internet in any way, extremely foreign to Europe with no clear friendly intentions. One of few times I can say I am proud to be living on old continent.
exactly, we need to decentralize power, and knowledge (information) is power. it seems innocuous when we each leak a little here and there, but surveillance tech is vacuuming up every tiny bit of it.
living in europe doesn't much matter, given the reach of these companies and their interweaving into government systems, along with reciprocal surveillance agreements (however-many-eyes countries).
I agree 100%. I have nearly all google domains blocked in my hosts file and was frustrated to find out google captcha was required on a few government websites. I understand rolling your own can be difficult or expensive but it's the government we're talking about here. They're no strangers to spending.
> i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones
How is that possible, since corporations are, by definition, creations of government through law?
i mean, that's like asking how is it possible to compartmentalize anything. as elaborated elsewhere, it isn't about literally separating all interests, just those that harm the public. it's about removing the negative externalies that companies like google impose on us via such government contracts.
> just those that harm the public
But it’s not that simple. What harms the public? Many would argue being able to use data google collects (legally through subpoenas or grey-legally through any of the number reports that have come out since Snowden) helps government agencies by increasing public security—thus the opposite of harm. Being
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I understand the feeling, but that's not possible, and moreover, after reflection, why should it be so?
If government can literally fine/shutdown your business arbitrarily (as they do for lockdowns, permits, etc.), then they should have a voice in the government that could treat them so terribly.
Unless you mean to say that government should be so much smaller that it doesn't impose separate business taxes, import/export controls, require permitting and licensing and follow arbitrary regulations on those businesses, which I could get behind. Ideally, if there's no advantage or penalty to avoid by petitioning government, won't everyone stop paying attention to government? No gaming the game can happen then!
The problem is that we can't have it both ways, can't restrict a group from petitioning and then pose rules they MUST follow, without a say. That's not democracy at all.
Companies are just groups of individuals after all, and should have just as much voice as an activist group does, like ACLU or Americans for Tax Reform or whatever.
The government of Italy makes rules that apply to Italians and those doing business with them.
If you’re Italian, you do have a say, and if you’re doing international business in Italy then you accept the sovereign risk of dealing with a foreign state.
you seem to be arguing from the corporate personhood stance. corporations still have an outsized voice via their rich owners. they shouldn't, however, be privileged with extra voice unaccorded the ordinary citizenry.