171–180 of 482 posts
Personally, I'm really glad that Google published such a clear, plain-spoken post to tackle this issue head on. This whole issue makes me want to donate a bunch of money to the EFF. If anyone else feels the same way, you can donate to the EFF here: https://supporters.eff.org/donate and I believe a lot of employers will match contributions.
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Read the NEXT SENTENCE! "Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records." AND THE TWO AFTER THAT: "We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely fals…
It is very possible that Google is lying.
I can't understand the repeated use of "direct access". It's the kind of language a lawyer would use to qualify a patent clause. - We do not provide direct access to our servers. - We do not provide direct access nor is there a backdoor. - O, but we do still pipe all of your data to external NSA servers. Every company named (I'm not just picking on Google here) has come out with the same overarching statement. "We do…
Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false. I'm not sure how much more strongly you'd like t…
"We only give data to the government in response legal requests about named individuals."
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OK, in an alternate reality, what would a clear, flat-out denial look like? I mean, how could we tell such a thing differently than what was in the OP? First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of…
"We would never do this, not because the government hasn't asked us to, but because it's morally abhorrent. It goes against everything we personally believe in and stand for. Even if we were legally required to cooperate, we would resist and suffer incarceration if necessary. We believe in freedom more strongly than we fear the consequences of not cooperating with an oppressive government." That kind of thing.
That's subjective, and I think you have severely unrealistic expectations of how far companies should be willing to go in this matter.
I believe Google's response is satisfactory. We can't prove negatives, so it's pointless to second guess Larry's post as being an orchestrated ruse. It at leasts gives us an official position and stance from the other party.
When I worked IT for a medium sized university we were asked by the DOJ to install switches that copied all internet traffic directly to an unspecified government server. We were told all ISPs (anyone providing internet to more than 100 persons) were told to do this as well. We refused to comply obviously as the request was absurd, but in the small print of the request we were told we were not allowed to speak of the…
(My point with this comment is to point out a contradiction--you can't prove that silence clauses work by talking about a real example of one.)
Just make a big enough stir, be explicit about what threats were levied, and tell us all. It would be impossible to prosecute them after that shitstorm.
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OK, in an alternate reality, what would a clear, flat-out denial look like? I mean, how could we tell such a thing differently than what was in the OP? First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of…
Instead of enumerating what they don't do, which leads one to wonder what's left out, they could exhaustively enumerate the ways that they do cooperate. To a certain extent that's what they do with the transparency report. But I saw no strong claim that the report was complete, on the contrary the "whenever possible" language outright suggests the report is incomplete. I'm sympathetic to being caught between a rock a…
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I agree, but what could Page say to convince us otherwise? Either the government is coercing them, and they have to issue lies as denials, or they are participating voluntarily and are voluntarily lying, or they are not participating. The second option seems unlikely to me.
Well, you can't prove a negative so I'm not sure there's anything Page can say. But at the same time they can't all be right. NSA says it's getting data in some form from Google, Page says no direct access. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle then... but where?
If that is true, why would we expect that Google officials would be able to make any public confirmation of the Top Secret program? And, given that, why, in that case, would we expect the truth to be "in the middle"?
Conversely, if the leaked document is not genuine, then I still don't see any basis for expecting the truth to be in the "middle" between the false document and the Google denial.
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"We would never do this, not because the government hasn't asked us to, but because it's morally abhorrent. It goes against everything we personally believe in and stand for. Even if we were legally required to cooperate, we would resist and suffer incarceration if necessary. We believe in freedom more strongly than we fear the consequences of not cooperating with an oppressive government." That kind of thing.
I don't think that the ethics are so clear cut. Let's suppose that Google's servers contain data that the U.S. federal government could use to prevent an act of violence that would harm or kill innocent people. Is it more ethical to deny access to this data on privacy grounds, or to grant access to this data to prevent violence? The typical response here on HN is that the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated. Th…
Should they be developing software to figure out who is beating their kids and notify the local police? Cheating on thier taxes and notify the IRS? Breaking their marriage vows and notify thier spouses?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false. I'm not sure how much more strongly you'd like t…
It's exactly the kind of denial you'd expect them to issue if they were legally required to deny any involvement.
I think there's a world of difference between a gag order where you are not allowed to confirm, and an order to explicitly deny involvement. I'm not saying the former is "good", but there's a difference.