The US Department of Commerce is seeking to end the right of users of cloud services to remain anonymous.
The proposal first emerged in January, documents show, detailing new rules (National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities) for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, which include Know Your Customer (KYC) regulation, which is normally used by banks and financial institutions.
But now, the US government is citing concerns over “malicious foreign actors” and their usage of these services as a reason to effectively end anonymity on the cloud, including when only signing up for a trial.
Another new proposal from the notice is to cut access to US cloud services to persons designated as “foreign adversaries.”
As is often the case, although the justification for such measures is a foreign threat, US citizens inevitably, given the nature of the infrastructure in question, get caught up as well. And, once again, to address a problem caused by a few users, everyone will be denied the right to anonymity.
That would these days be any government’s dream, it appears, while the industry itself, especially the biggest players like Amazon, can implement the identification feature with ease, at the same time gaining a valuable new source of personal data.
The only losers here appear to be users of IaaS platforms, who will have to allow tech giants yet another way of accessing their sensitive personal information and risk losing it through leaks.
Meanwhile, the actual malicious actors will hardly give up those services – leaked personal data that can be sold and bought illegally, including by those the proposal says it is targeting.
Until now, providers of cloud services felt no need to implement a KYC regime, instead allowing people to become users, or try their products, simply by providing an email, and a valid credit card in case they signed up for a plan.
As for what the proposal considers to be an IaaS, the list is long and includes services providing processing, storage, networks, content delivery networks (CDNs), virtual private servers (VPSs), proxies, domain name resolution services, and more.
The older I get, the less crazy those people who live off the grid are.
Also, if this proposal is really because of all the hacking that’s been going on in not sure how this is supposed to help. But, they’ve never needed a great reason to try to take privacy away, have they?
The amount of automated traffic we get for no apparent reason is insane. DDOS attacks are so common. It’s super easy to find cheap or free computing power aparently. Not sure this law would help with that, but still.
It’s not intended to help, they just make random-ass claims when their real intent is perfectly obvious, yet millions of idiots believe them.
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Yeah it’s the same here in the EU, with eg. the Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse which would effectively just have been mass-scale surveillance of all messaging and would have made e2e encryption illegal, and would have done nothing to prevent child abuse. It got struck down in Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights, but I think there’s other similarly spooky surveillance laws in the pipeline. It’s only a matter of time until one or more get implemented
Any time they claim it’s to protect children or fight terrorism, it’s always about more surveillance. They wrap unpopular legislation in either of those wrappers (children or terrorists).
Yeah but I need more income before I can do that. By the time I get to retire, the whole off the grid living will be over regulated. Like you can’t read books that are not war novels past 75 years of age. Then at 80 they won’t even let you live near bears if you’re on blood thinners, specially Panda bears. Pandas don’t have a clue on self preservation, so imagine one bleeding profusely. So it’s very understandable.