Time for some trust-building with the community, after that um, unpleasant discovery that NSA has been up in that Google, and Google willingly accepted.
About Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc, we have seen the list, Ive got to say, scumbags.
They sold us all out and threw us under the bus.
Lavabit - a simple company put up more of a fight than a multi billion dollar giant.
That fibers have been tapped by state actors was well known pre-Snowden (I recall reading a story about how subs were used in Russia etc), yet Google only completed encrypting their private fibers post-Swnoden.
The assumption pre-Snowden was that only "hostile states" did that kind of thing, e.g fibres in and out of China were probably tapped, but most of the internet wasn't. Because, you know, search warrants do exist.
It's rather arrogant to say "everyone should have known". Snowden's leaks have been making waves for a year solid now exactly because he showed that reality was the worst case scenario only the most extreme of the extreme postulated previously.
Sure, but as far as we know Google was not aware of it (it = US internal taping) and introduced encryption of private traffic to counteract it. I'm not aware of articles proving they knew about the taps. Are you? (yes, we can speculate they did, but let's say it like that)
There's also the fact that Google only started challenging the FISA court post-Snowden. To my knowledge, they're not even challenging the unconstitutional spying, just the gag order preventing Google from telling you how frequently Google turns over your data to the feds.
This isn't just some theoretical, might be spying on "those people" sort of thing either. If you're reading this website, you probably are/have been a target:
Since Google openly acknowledges that Google never really deletes anything from gmail and other services (disk is cheap), they're providing information about you that even you have long forgotten.
And finally, if you say "I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear" then you have completely missed the point of how this stuff works. Remember they target you, everyone who contacts you, and everyone who contacts that extended group.
With that information, they find out who you love, and which ones of those people have pressure points. "Viraptor, it has come to our attention that your father is evading taxes. You wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your father, would you? We would like you to do some work for us in your role as sysadmin. Then we can forget about that incident..."
Many strawmen, but nothing relating to my comment, which was "do we know Google knew about the taps". I'm not aware of any article proving that was the case.
Re. the first link - companies of the size of Google will meet with the NSA at some point. They have to comply with many regulations and will have private chats at high level. They even willingly run NSA's software (selinux). This doesn't prove or disprove cooperation in communication taping.
Just one of your points I wanted to address.
> Google never really deletes anything from gmail and other services (disk is cheap)
Also, data invalidation is hard - probably every company that's big enough should have it in their ToC, unless they assign a full drive to each customer and do hardware wipe on it when something is deleted. Deleting a file is essentially just setting a "this is deleted" flag, until other data overwrites this. I'm willing to bet none of the companies you interact with guarantees your data is physically deleted. Everyone should be aware of that.
You may want to look at an article I wrote in May 2013, which was the first to disclose that Google was challenging two secret National Security Letters in court. This was before anyone except Glenn and Laura had heard of some guy named Edward Snowden:
http://www.cnet.com/news/justice-department-tries-to-force-g...
There are other examples as well, like the Feds' subpoena for search logs that Google fought in court and mostly won. You may recall that Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft received the same subpoena but did not fight the Feds in court; they instead quietly complied.
“Today, Mehdi added some detail concerning what actually happened when the request from the Government was made. First, the Government had asked for information that could identify people on an individual basis (most likely, an IP address). Microsoft declined this request, and instead handed the Government a watered down version of data, which Mehdi made clear did not include personal information. The information provided by Microsoft, Mehdi said, consisted only of a sample of search terms and their frequency, as well as a random sample of pages in the MSN Search Index.”
Just a minute of research would have led you to this, but of course, that would run counter to your pro-Google bias.
About Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc, we have seen the list, Ive got to say, scumbags.
They sold us all out and threw us under the bus.
Lavabit - a simple company put up more of a fight than a multi billion dollar giant.
Never forget.