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.
“What is a Fourth Amendment?” - Lawmakers
Lawmakers have figured out they can circumvent 4A by forcing the private sector and external governments to do their surveillance. It worked for banking KYC and it worked for FATCA. The industry is apparently not worried at all about losing customers. And they won’t. To circumvent 4A, just outsource governance to a non-government entity.
Love the irony of being blocked from reading that article because I am anonymous and the #reclaimthenet hypocrits insist on using Cloudflare.
So I can only comment on the title and what the OP (apparently) copied. Judging by how the masses happily continue using banks who voluntarily abuse KYC by collecting more info than required, internet users will also be pushovers who give in to whatever KYC comes their way.
This policy will actually create victims. Just like GSM registration creates victims. In regions that require GSM registration phone theft goes up because criminals will steal a phone just for a live SIM chip. So KYC creates incentive for criminals to run their services from someone else’s PC.
Replacement link to a privacy-respecting host:
This article seems to suggest the KYC rules only apply to foreign customers:
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/commerce-proposes-rule-to-fight-foreign-cloud-cyber-threats-a-24219
but then you have to wonder how they will know you’re domestic without a bit of KYC on Americans as well.
BTW, a good way to find privacy-respecting links is to search using this service:
https://ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion/
That search tool will not return Cloudflare MitMd links.
