Global Warning with Ryan McBeth
Aug 23, 2026 · 19 min · 10 segments
On this week’s Global Warning: - **A PBS station got ghosted by their data storage company.** - **Puerto Rico has a water problem.** - **China delivers drones to African customers.** - **The British…
Ryan McBethHost
So what happened? The cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, went out of business, and the data center owner, Iron Mountain, refused to release the data to the PBS station.
And the data in question includes the station's coverage of COVID-19, East St. Louis' history, the Great Flood of 1993, and over 11,000 files.
The judge in the case blocked Iron Mountain from deleting the data while the matter was being settled in court.
The judge also ruled that Iron Mountain needs to hand over any physical devices holding the station's data.
Furthermore, the judge ruled that the PBS station needs to find a third party such as a former OSS worker who can help retrieve the data within 30 days without sharing or corrupting any of the data that belongs to other OSS clients.
So why does this matter? You know, we live in an age of the cloud, and while the cloud has made things really convenient, it's also just somebody else's computer.
How do you sue if the company in question goes belly up? How do you ensure the safety of your data? I'm sure the affiliate station did some homework on this for jumping with both feet, but this is a problem that all businesses and government organizations are going to need to address.
They need to have contingency plans in place if they can't get access to their cloud store data.
The courts, while successful in providing a path for PBS to secure its data, might not be able to do this on a larger scale.
Imagine what it would look like if the data center in question was hit by a kinetic strike from China or even a ransomware or cyber warfare attack.
How do we recover this data? How do we help companies and other organizations get repayment for lost digital assets? And How do you even put an insurance price tag on digital archive data from 70 years ago? This is likely where Congress will need to step in offering legal frameworks and infrastructure for such matters.
In a war against China, we're likely to see more of this and it could lead to some serious chaos if we don't have the right infrastructure in place to get things moving again.
So what happened? The cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, went out of business, and the data center owner, Iron Mountain, refused to release the data to the PBS station.
And the data in question includes the station's coverage of COVID-19, East St. Louis' history, the Great Flood of 1993, and over 11,000 files.
The judge in the case blocked Iron Mountain from deleting the data while the matter was being settled in court.
The judge also ruled that Iron Mountain needs to hand over any physical devices holding the station's data.
Furthermore, the judge ruled that the PBS station needs to find a third party such as a former OSS worker who can help retrieve the data within 30 days without sharing or corrupting any of the data that belongs to other OSS clients.
So why does this matter? You know, we live in an age of the cloud, and while the cloud has made things really convenient, it's also just somebody else's computer.
How do you sue if the company in question goes belly up? How do you ensure the safety of your data? I'm sure the affiliate station did some homework on this for jumping with both feet, but this is a problem that all businesses and government organizations are going to need to address.
They need to have contingency plans in place if they can't get access to their cloud store data.
The courts, while successful in providing a path for PBS to secure its data, might not be able to do this on a larger scale.
Imagine what it would look like if the data center in question was hit by a kinetic strike from China or even a ransomware or cyber warfare attack.
How do we recover this data? How do we help companies and other organizations get repayment for lost digital assets? And How do you even put an insurance price tag on digital archive data from 70 years ago? This is likely where Congress will need to step in offering legal frameworks and infrastructure for such matters.
In a war against China, we're likely to see more of this and it could lead to some serious chaos if we don't have the right infrastructure in place to get things moving again.
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