Virulent transparency advocates, Blacknight want customers to know that data hosted with Blacknight is not impacted by PRISM.
As information about the US based intelligence gathering program PRISM continues to make headlines, Blacknight has launched an outreach effort to educate their customers on the nature of the program in order to help them determine whether it impacts them.
Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon explains: “ As a 100% Irish owned and operated business, we have no physical ties to the United States and are therefore not subject to PRISM. We own all our own servers and, apart from one or two, all our servers are based in Ireland on a 100% Blacknight controlled network. We are also building our own data centre here in Carlow to give us even more autonomy.”
Neylon, who began talking about the issue through the company’s award winning technology blog,
http://blog.blacknight.com, recommends that the best way for Blacknight customers to determine if they are using a service that may be affected is to research where the company’s servers are physically located as well as whether it is US owned.
If servers are physically based in Ireland and owned and controlled by an Irish company then they are subject to Irish law. However, if the servers are physically located outside Ireland they do not have the benefits of Irish law regardless of who owns them. Servers (or services) running off servers physically based in Ireland (or other parts of the EU) should be covered by EU law, but if the hosting provider is US owned there is no guarantee that is protected by EU law.
Neylon continues: “The internet is a global network. While we control our own portion of it we cannot claim to know what is happening outside our own part of it. Our physical network is NSA and PRISM-free, but we have no way of knowing what is happening elsewhere.”
Over the past 10 years Blacknight has received less than half a dozen requests from law enforcement agencies. Most of these requests were for information that was already in the public domain.
As an Irish company, Blacknight only responds to requests received from An Garda Síochána, the Irish law enforcement agency. (Overseas law enforcement agencies would normally route their queries via Irish law enforcement).
Blacknight is not currently aware of an Irish equivalent to the PRISM program.
For more information on Blacknight’s suite of secure services please visit
http://www.blacknight.comTo read the Blacknight blog post on “Security, Privacy, PRISM and hosting” please visit
http://blog.blacknight.com/security-privacy-prism-and-hosting.html
