With Apple on the verge of being “banned” in Russia, it seems major American tech companies including Google and Twitter are planning on leaving Russia in response to this new legislation which would force tech companies to store Russian information in Russia, due to go into effect on the first day of the new year. The NSA Microsoft was the first company to leave Russia, relocating its Skype Dev team from Moscow to Prague, while Adobe followed afterwards.
According to ITWire, it is Russia’s new law that has caused this tech exodus rather than simple Russophobia, or American sanctions forcing US companies to avoid dealing with Russia. The new rules will force companies that gather data to store Russian data locally where they are easily accessible by local authorities. While Microsoft and Google intend to or already have moved their dev teams, Adobe wil be maintaining Russian operations via the cloud and thus avoid even maintaining any physical office in Russia. It would seem that tech companies that stay behind may be facing a tough time.“The Internet began initially when the Internet first appeared as a special CIA project and is still being developed that way. The rest is what has made it to the market and has developed to huge proportions. Nevertheless it is initially a military program, a special program, and special services are still at the center of things,” Putin said in April at a local television.
Putin believes that foreign spying are credible threats to Russia and must be thwarted via enforcement of the new rules. Putin claims that American companies like Google and Microsoft are collecting user data from Russia and the entire world and handing it directly to the CIA and NSA and even recommends that Russians completely avoid using such services due to their track-record of cooperation with the US government. The claim these tech companies make seems to be that storing data in Russia might lead to authorities there being able to access it. However, this is a moot point seeing as these companies have long claimed that their systems were completely immune from ANY government interference. Why would they leave now, avoiding Russianscruitiny that would at least keep Russian information away from the NSA while still protecting their users’ interests?
This would at least empiracally suggest that reccent tech-giants’ protests against the NSA post-Snowden-revelations is merely a reaction to being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and that they are really more than willing to cooperate with the only proven large-scale drag-net spy agency in the world. Although Putin might be criticised, he seems to be the only leader willing to risk the ire of the US government and the corporations that fund their reelection campaigns, what with Google surpassing EVEN Goldman Sachs in terms of political donations in order to protect his citizens.
