Global Criminal Compliance Handbook

This document would probably never have become so famous if Microsoft wouldn’t have tried to remove it from the web.

criminalcompliancehandbook

Censorship is always stupid, always counter-productive (fortunately). Worse: if you fall into the trap, there is no way to escape. Microsoft understood that, but too late.

Let me add something.

Although Microsoft managers are apparently very angry about this disclosure, they should understand this is actually a marketing advantage for their products in terms of transparency: any subscriber to an on line service is interested in knowing precisely if and how his/her personal data will be retained and possibly disclosed to third parties, official or not. This is now perfectly clear as far as Microsoft on line services are concerned. It is less clear as far as competitors’ on line services are concerned. Making public such arrangements is just normal. Not sure other, competing companies offering similar services have such a transparency policy, as most of them (at least within the United States) might have similar arrangements with Government bodies. We just don’t know.

UPDATE: see this example (Paypal/eBay)

My usual old refrain: don’t highlight what you want to keep secret. Cipher anything before you put it on line, whether it’s confidential stuff or not. Create your PGP/GPG key and share it. Think of your privacy, it’s easy.

Get your privacy

Three essential tools…

• GNU Privacy Guard : HERE (the privacy engine)
• FireGPG : HERE (the Firefox add-on)
• Enigmail : HERE (the Thunderbird add-on)
  — For Symbian mobile phones see here
  …and that’s it!