“The government does not have access to Google servers”

Does any government, US or otherwise, their agents, representatives, contractors or NGO's have access, directly or indirectly, through any means, to DATA, FILES, COMMUNICATIONS, LOGS or any other information having any relationship whatsoever to users?

This could be, and probably should be, refined, IANAL.

The point is simple: We don't care about "direct access to servers". We care about access to data. And this can be provided through many channels, direct and indirect. It can even be provided via daily tape backup dumps. Of course, it can be provided to organizations peripherally working for or with a government yet not directly to a government agency. And, finally, it could be provided to another government that, in turn, can pipe it back to US governnment agencies or collaborators.

The rabbit hole can be very deep.

As it takes less resources to obtain information you can bet that there will be more efforts to obtain information. If you want to avoid much of this, you just require hand-delivered documents from accredited agents to accredited agents, manual review of these documents (and perhaps shipping them between corporate offices for such review). Get a review for being thorough, pushing back, and not hurrying. Make sure it takes time, that lawyers go through them one by one, and send to another lawyer (preferably somewhere else) to cross-check. stall for as long as you can on every order you can. You will get fewer.

Google is essentially claiming transparency, while ensuring that the transparency report is increasingly meaningless because it is easier and easier to get info in ways that won't get into it.

Within Google's denials is more or less a confirmation that what the NYT is saying is true.

These accusations are seriously getting out of hand. This is also seriously getting so illogical that I've considered whether it's even worth posting a response.

Is accusing someone with a badly created powerpoint presentation now enough for such a massive storm?

Yesterday, Larry gave a thorough point to point denial to the Washington Post article. Conspiracy theorists@HN moved the goalpost and started talking about how if Google isn't doing X they must be providing data to NSA servers. Now that David Drummond has come out and denied that Google's not doing Y, some HNers start complaining that he's lying even though there's no evidence to the contrary.

Google has committed its fair share of mistakes but as employees inside the company we have always stood by our users and a lot of these attacks are indirectly questioning our moral character.

Larry and especially David have created a culture where we push back when the government makes overreaching user data requests. These push backs have been happening for years. Google has even gone to courts questioning the constitutional validity of NSLs. (source: [1]). There are times when courts uphold the Government request. Google publishes these in its Transparency report ([2]). The claim that these guys are willfully lying on this issue is completely out of character with what their actions have been till date.

You say that government has already admitted that they access the data. Where? Do you mean the Verizon CDRs? Or are you using the flimsy PPT as evidence? Maybe your source is one the myriad of articles that have used the powerpoint as their source. Or maybe your source is one of those of another articles that use other badly sourced article as their sources. Maybe you mean Obama's statement that the government does track emails. In that case, being in technology, I hope you realize that being a MITM email snooper is one of the easiest things to do. That's why you never ever use email for secure communication. Maybe you don't understand these "nerd-y" things (yes, I was a shocked too when a HNer threw that at me), but I implore you to logically think about this story.

Yesterday, there were a flurry of posts that were seeing a conspiracy in how Mark Zuckerberg's and Larry's response were similar. Why have we HNers turned into conspiracy theorists now? It was only later when some sane voices pointed out that they were each responding to the specific points raised by the original WaPo article, that that controversy died down. Of course no one seems to mention that the original WaPo post has retracted several claims especially about companies being in the know. [3]

Some conspiracy theorists@HN have even talked about spies infiltrating as Google engineers. Are you guys serious? The level of control/monitoring/logging that happens to employees at Google when accessing any data at Google (even when you're just trying to debug why processing that data is crashing your server) is so huge that this just won't be a feasible strategy for these spies. Also, with all these checks in place it's impossible to get hold of information without a lot of flags being raised. Even if we assume that all US based engineers at Google are somehow government spies (a preposterous claim which I'm sure someone must have made on HN by now), Google has engineers outside US. Engineers who have access to the same alerting/monitoring systems that would alert them if such unauthorized data access was happening. Those engineers would not be bound by any US government imposed gag order that conspiracy theorists here seem to claim.

I've even had someone claim on HN that because Google worked with NSA to protect Chinese human rights activists from spying attempts/hacking attacks, Google's helping NSA spy on US citizens. This is so illogical that it makes no sense to me.

I've had the opportunity to have worked with Yonatan's team and I have immense respect for him. I also completely mirror his feelings [4]. Any massive data sharing/accessing would be really hard to do without this turning up in some shape or form in front of me and if this were happening I would not be at Google. Most of us engineers would not be.

Enough with the personal attacks questioning our values.

Now to the bigger question, if a democratically elected US "government" is making and forcing private individuals and organizations to follow extra-constitutional norms. Shouldn't you actually take this issue up with your local senator/representative? Contact them: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_c... http://www.house.gov/representatives/ Doesn't being in a representative republic mean that that's how you solve the problems you're having with your government. I was one of those who were mystified by the current president's oratory. Yet, I also believe that if something is not right it's time to use the proper channels to have your voice heard. How many of you are US citizens and have written multiple posts here on HN since yesterday but haven't called your local representative yet? Now is the time.

These witch hunts without evidence, all these conspiracy theories, the attempts to find fault with every statement being made; these are not what HN should be about. Let's actually do something to bring about some real change.

Sources: [1] - http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587003-38/judge-orders-g...; [2] - https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/ [3] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanhall/2013/06/07/washingt...; [4] - https://plus.google.com/103389452828130864950/posts/huwQsphB...