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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

I feel that if the NSA were to ask for much of Google’s data right at this moment there isn’t anything Google could do, and I’m not even that sure that they would want to do anything. The same goes for FB. If they decide not to comply then both of these companies might risk being broken up or worse, so why risk it?

The bottom line is that if you decide doing anything against the current US powers that be (like harassing a Senator from outside his house late at night) do not use any of the services coming from companies directly liable to the US authorities. The same goes if you’re in China or Russia, try not to use the services of companies directly liable to those countries’ governments if you want to vigorously protest the current political status-quo.

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This past week a woman yelled loudly about stabbing Mitch mcconnell in the neck outside his house as part of a large crowd. It became a hot-button topic but no one fell out of an 8th story apartment window.

The NSA does not have a mandate to do what you’re describing, they face extensive civilian oversight and programs like their metadata collection were extensively debated in public. Are there exceptions? Yes; but they don’t have the same mandate or the same powers of control as some of these other nations, so the effect is vastly different.

>This past week a woman yelled loudly about stabbing Mitch mcconnell in the neck outside his house as part of a large crowd.

Presumably people protesting against Putin or the people from Tiananmen Square weren't all asking for peaceful elections, I bet there were some protesters among them who were literally asking for Putin's or Deng Xiaoping's heads, that's what I meant with "vigorously protest". It's understandable that some people in the US would want to "vigorously protest" against people who they think are directly liable for other's people deaths, as I presume that lady thinks of the likes of Mitch Mcconnell.

As per the NSA mandate and the "civilian oversight", that's what I meant with "right at this moment". I think what you're describing was generally true until 2 or 3 years ago (yes, even after the Snowden leaks), but I'm afraid things are not the same in the current political climate.

> they face extensive civilian oversight and programs like their metadata collection were extensively debated in public

Most democratically elected representatives don't know what the NSA is up to. The Director of National Intelligence directly lied in his public testimony when asked about NSA collection. It took a whistleblower to reveal even the basic outline of the NSA's massive surveillance powers, which the civilian population was unaware of. That whistleblower now has to live in Russia, or else he'd be rotting away in jail, or worse. The metadata program was only extensively debated after those revelations, and we civilians are still in the dark about what the NSA does. I don't trust that they've stopped their mass surveillance of Americans. A massive organization that acts with such little oversight is a danger to democracy, regardless of what it claims in public.

This is untrue. If the NSA could just ask Google for it's data, it wouldn't have had to create all the clandestine spying programs that it needed to steal the data from Google. Remember all the info we learned when the Snowden leaks came to light.

And we shouldn’t believe for a second this isn’t already happening with multiple three letter agencies.

Perhaps... but when you walk into a US company there’s typically not a “party” office on the first floor and I’m not talking about the place where everyone eats cake.

Nope in the US it is room 641A - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Aren't we always dependent on US companies? Same for Chinese companies? Think about it for a second. If you use the Linux kernel, you use world-wide code. Its at odds with a concept of monolithic, national code.

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