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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The scariest part is that this amount of data access can be very effectively weaponized to build a strong case against anyone. All of us are inadvertently breaking some law or the other all the time. If the government doesn't like you for any reason they are one court order away from blackmailing you or putting you away.

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Including Google. There was a well-publicized case in which they were "hoist on their own petard" a few years back.

What happened, basically, from memory, is that someone was arguing that Google did something wrong (I forget, but it might have been the collusion to keep down employee wages or something) and so there was discovery of emails by Google, and they eat their own dogfood so it was gmail.

So Google smugly said "hah, there aren't any incriminating emails", but then it turned out that the autosaved drafts of some of their emails were incriminating, and were preserved, and ended up being produced in court.

So remember that the next time you type an email or a forum or facebook post, and you revise it extensively before hitting the button to send it.

It's incredibly interesting that unsent emails were used to support a case. Were they used to prove intent of some kind?

Well, after...Googling...it, there's a little more to the story. It was actually a fight with Oracle about the usual stuff (Java patents), and the email itself was covered by attorney-client privilege, and therefore didn't have to be shown to the other side, but the drafts slipped through by accident because, you know, the subject didn't actually say "Attorney work product - confidential" until almost the final version. And although there is something called a "clawback", the judge ruled that their attempt was too little and too late. "Your honor, it's devastating to my case!"

Basically, Google relied on an algorithm/search engine to screen for privileged documents instead of having lawyers review things the old-fashioned way and they got bit by that.

Agree. Why giving it all away to google then? I don’t get people who complain about privacy though insist on using a gmail email, chrome and make all their search on google, not clearing cookies regularly and using adblockers.

> they are one court order away

The implication being that the courts are corrupt?

If that's the case I think you have way worse things to worry about than "data access", the courts have much greater powers than that.

The scale of it is what is of most interest.

If the court gave a similar order to retrive similar amounts of physical (eg paper) information from your house, and anyone you happened to correspnd with it would be extremely notable and expensive as well as creating dramatic television pictures. Some of that is a deterrant to its abuse.

"Google, fetch" the scale, ease and speed of that is worrying. How is its abuse to be stopped?

Courts may or may not be corrupt, but regardless of that it hasn't historically been very difficult for authorities to find a judge to sign off on a very wide-reaching warrant (like this very case).

Yeah. We voluntarily give info to Google (most of us don't think about it that way, but we do). Google winds up with all this data. In theory, I don't have a problem with the authorities being able to get their hands on it, after getting a warrant. In practice, "getting a warrant" doesn't seem to be as high a bar as it should be.

> The implications being that the courts are corrupt?

You don’t have to be corrupt to be ineffective. Have you been following patent rulings? Or FISA?

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