The United States is slowly, but surely, becoming an extremely toxic country for any and all projects. Their government, for the past decade or so, has been increasingly removing rights from people while giving themselves more power to spy, take down without notice and censor things.
No project should be host in the U.S. or in american servers/services.
Privacy Invasion
One of the earliest examples that comes to mind immediately is the cloud act. According to wikipedia:
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act or CLOUD Act (H.R. 4943) is a United States federal law enacted in 2018 by the passing of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, PL 115–141, Division V.
The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
This was extracted verbatim from their wikipedia article.
In other words: The U.S. government can, at any moment, for any reason, grab any information, from any american company, on any user(s), american or not, regardless of where its stored.
Added to that, there is also a mandatory backdoor on all american ISPs(which have been exploited by 3rd parties before).
This is EXACTLY what the U.S. and others have accused China of doing for decades. It’s a massive invasion of privacy
Censorship
If you didn’t hear, recently the U.S. finally acquired tiktok, after years of wanting to “for national security”. The excuse was that Bytedance, tiktok’s owner, as a chinese company, couldn’t be trusted. What did they do immediately after buying? Censor and shadowban anything related to Epstein and ICE.
This isn’t new.
During the 21st century alone, the U.S. tried to censor results of climate studies, censored information on the IRAQ war, banned the use of certain words by the Centers for Disease Control, forbid media outlets from the white house, censorship of various topics in schools(LGBT, Evolution, Sex Ed, Racism), etc
Censorship has been used all throughout the U.S.’ history, and has been getting worse lately, with the increasingly unreliable politicians and laws in the country.
Why/How you should avoid
Any project made by a company in the United States, or making use of american web hosts such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc is subject to all of the above listed. If your data is routed through the U.S., they more than likely wiretap on it, harvesting now to decrypt later at the very least.
There are only two ways to avoid it:
- Don’t use American Services: Don’t use Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Github, etc. Make use of local ones from your country instead, or at the very least from countries like those in the EU, Brazil, Canada, etc where privacy is in the law.
- Use End-To-End Encryption: If you absolutely must use an american service for a part of your application, make sure communication is E2E encrypted.
If you care for your user’s privacy, and your own, ensure that none of your online projects make use of american companies and services. Anything you wouldn’t trust to be hosted in Russia or China shouldn’t be hosted in the United States.
Sources: Wikipedia(Espionage Act of 1917), Wikipedia(Censorship in the United States), Wikipedia(Censorship of school curricula in the United States)
