FBI examined Google records to see if anyone had knowledge of Guccifer persona
twitter.com
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Because many on HN know and consciously recognize the facts here, my question would be: how do you all cope with surveillance?
TOR protected the spies it was made for, only because there was a substantial amount of other, less interesting, traffic.
The mere act of straying outside the norm is what makes you vulnerable. Protecting the data itself is secondary to making the data seem uninteresting to begin with.
There is one way which may reduce the risk. Build your whole system in RAM including OS. When totally power off, everything is volatilized. To lower the cost of RAM, one could just put the OS and service in RAM, but let the encrypted data in drive with key in RAM/RAM-disk.
The difficulty here is building a OS in RAM. There are some tricks but most of them need a host which may contribute to vulnerability.
This doesn't work as well as you'd expect.
I know Queensland law requires you to unlock your phone for a cop, or you face prison time. I'd expect there's similar laws for disclosure of encryption keys.
I don't know if I'm willing to "make it hard for them" if that means facing jail time.
https://www.hallpayne.com.au/blog/2019/january/mobile-phone-...
>Judge North’s comments do make it clear, however, that if you answer questions where you acknowledge ownership of a mobile phone, then there is a potential for self-incrimination.
Compounding this is the advent of “hate crimes”, or rather the utterance of forbidden words. Now a days you can be hauled off in jail in many countries simply by expressing a wrong opinion, let alone hosting a service where others are allowed to do the same.
You mean authoritarian world. Most people couldn’t name one tenet of fascism regarding finance, labor, etc. Fascism is financially left wing but socially right, which is the opposite of liberal capitalism—regardless of whether the capitalistic govt is authoritarian. yes I realize most people use it as a buzzword. And no I don’t want an authoritarian govt.
In America at least, a search of this nature has to be very narrow in order to be valid, even the secret ones.
In reality it's an end-run around the court system. If the government officially penalized them for not complying, various parties would have standing to assert their rights. So the punishment isn't officially tied to the failure to submit, but the threat is still there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...
"Anyway, I've come to ask whether you could do a favor for us."
And it's the organised crime that is associated with mafia tactics...
The majority is more afraid of what will happen if the government does not find the information to catch the person trying to hurt them, than they are about the government finding information about them and hurting them with it.
Remember it is majority rules. Not even 80/20 but 51/49. You only need 51 percent of people to have less to hide. And people in the majority are typically not the ones that have things to hide for legitimate reasons. It is the people in the minority that are innocent of any wrongdoing , but be undesirable for some reason, that have something to fear.
This only makes it worse. This year 51% of the population voted for Party B, so they have 51% of the legislature. They vote as a block, so they vote in anything supported by the majority of the coalition that Party B represents. So then you get bad laws that are only supported by 26% of people (51% of 51%). Next year Party A has 51% of the legislature, but not the Presidency, so they can't repeal it.
A possible solution to this would be to allow for the repeal of any law that wouldn't currently have what it takes to pass, i.e. anyone can resubmit any existing law as a new bill and if it fails to pass both houses and earn the President's signature, it effects repeal of the existing law.
And then of course there is the large chunk of people who find the views of both parties so uninspiring or outright disgusting to not want to vote at all.
Its really surprising when any popular legislation is passed in any form, even watered down, in this mess of a system. Obviously though that is by design.
It happens often enough when people are polled on the legislation itself, rather than party preferences, people overwhelmingly support positions which may even be antithetical to both sides of parliament. Climate change legislation has enjoyed overwhlming support in oz for years, even amongst a slim majority on the right.
People overwhelming support environmental protections. But our parliament this week, under cover of covid, pushed through a massive regression in environemntal protections without even letting their own party discuss the legislation, let alone the opposition or the media.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/wisconsin-e2-80-99s-...
> The maps have exceeded their designers high expectations all decade long. In 2018, for example, Wisconsin voters re-elected a Democratic U.S. senator, backed Evers for governor over two-term Republican incumbent Scott Walker, placed Democrats in every elected statewide office, and preferred Democratic assembly candidates by a margin of 190,000 votes. Republicans held the chamber, 64-35. They won 64 percent of the seats, with 46 percent of the votes.
It would be difficult to call Wisconsin a democracy with a straight face at this point.
I think you don't understand how things are working. Senators are elected by the people, at the seat level. You can see what's happening here in this post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/04/several-l...
> [in 2018] They [Democrats] won 53 percent of the vote and only 36 percent of the seats. However, that can be explained in part by the fact that Democrats had far more seats in which they weren’t running against a Republican opponent. Nearly half of the votes the Democrats earned were in districts where their candidates didn’t face significant opposition. In contested races, Republicans won more votes than Democrats.
If you get 90% of votes for one seat where there is virtually no opposition, that has no bearing to the other seat where you lost 48% to 52%.
That's actual democracy, and even direct democracy. This is also confirmed by the 17th Amendment:
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-17/
> The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years
We already know ways to prevent the majority from imposing tyranny on the minority, we just decided that more absolute power is convenient.
Was momokoko saying that anyone was a hypocrite?
I really do wonder how many Patsy's have had their ego's exploited and got tricked into doing things so the spooks can control, manipulate, & exploit their targets for their own means.
Think about it, there are so many ways to control people and its been going on for tens of thousands of years when looking at religions putting the fear of god into people who dared to step out of line.
There are absolutely issues of legitimate natural security for many things, then it becomes a matter of how we balance privacy vs. the functional needs of the community.
If the FBI legitimately discovers some crazies trying to make a nuclear bomb, I can imagine a Judge authorizing some kinds of searches which would not otherwise be allowed, and that 'most people' would find that justified.
Of course, widespread surveillance, especially of the arbitrary kind (i.e. catch-alls) and information gathering relegated to local-yocal Police Forces, probably are going to be problematic in the view of 'most people'.
And of course, there is the big hypocritical fact that bothers me a lot about this: that Google, who has absolutely no interest other that 'profit' seems to get a free pass on a lot of things while a national security apparatus, who's objectives are entirely in the realm of 'public service' - even when we don't always agree what those objectives are - are somehow more cynically scrutinized.
So the question is: how much of a threat is Guccifer, and what are reasonable means that we can use to go after him? Which will probably always be a hard question to answer.
For a more clear demonstration of harm, think about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and the very real and tangible effects that scandal had.
Cambridge Analytica was a serious problem, although I thought Facebook had cracked down on that kind of thing, and Google did much further in the past.
That’s not what coercion means.
coerce: persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats
Don’t cheapen the word by misusing it.
There is a pressure exerted by controlling someone's environment. The use of the word fits.
/ˈCHēpən/
verb
reduce the price of.
"the depreciation of the dollar would cheapen U.S. exports"
synonyms: reduce, lower, lower in price, cut, mark down, discount, depreciate, devalue, depress, put down, keep down, slash, axe
So words cost money now? News to me.
Guccifer was hacking into people's accounts, revealing information of a national interest.
So there is some proportional reaction by law enforcement.
"But when someone innocent gets caught up in it, then it's too late and there's no remedy."
Who are these innocents 'caught up in it', for which there 'no remedy'?
It's possible investigators make mistakes while matching DNA just as well, but we don't deny them the right, because it seems the 'science' supports DNA as evidence. So we use it.
I think that is a real but smaller concern - bigger concerns are large dragnets (arbitrary data collection), lack of oversight (no warrants), lack of proportionality (i.e. local Police getting access to all your searches because someone made a 'noise complaint'), and politicization (i.e. Trump getting search records on political enemies etc.).
My impression is half of HN are into some sort of espionage or something. 50% of people's darkest secret is they sniff their hand after scratching their arse; and they do that in front of everyone without batting an eyelid.
"But what if they get caught up in something", like what, the scandal over who ate the last snack in the break room?
A) gay, and in the closet?
B) a recreational drug user?
C) an activist for a movement the government doesn't like?
D) a supporter of C)?
There's also the problem of selective enforcement. Nearly everyone has done something wrong at some point, even if it was a minor traffic offence. If surveillance is good enough, the government will have dirt on close to 100% of people, leaving it in the position of being able to dig up decades of minor offences whenever it doesn't like you.
Just the narrative that suggests all people should be worried about secrecy; I'll warrant most people's secrets wouldn't cause enough of a stir to dissolve a sugar lump in a hot cup of tea.
If you don't want to post it publically, let me know and I'll create a temporary email to send it to. I'll be sure to delete it after verifying it.
...
Do you feel disgust in reaction to that request? I suspect most people would.
But why? It's not like it's anything sensitive, like a password. I mean...if you don't send the picture, what are you trying to hide? Are you a terrorist? I'm not even a government agent- I don't have the power to throw you in jail.
But, turns out, even when you don't have anything to hide, there's still some things you don't want to share. That's just human.
Not wanting to send you a picture is pretty orthogonal to worrying about the off chance that some gov official will at some point see me naked.
What address do you want me to send to?
It's a conversation. You can tell me everyone you know has secretly murdered at least one person and progress things somewhat (I'm being flippant, of course).
Saying things in public is not "being on record" though. Someone has to make the effort to look up about you, and we all wore a stupid costume, got drunk and made a pass at someone, dropped some litter, swore, or whatever ... in a Western Democracy are you going to shame me for normal behaviours, I think you'll struggle.
>Can you really not imagine how even the most innocent of statements or criticisms can be construed by a paranoid power in the worst possible light? //
Yes, what's the motivation? Fascist takeover? We're all in the same boat aren't we: OMG my neighbor looked at porn, let's burn him at the stake??
Secrets don’t just need to be incriminating, they can also just be embarrassing. People don’t want the world to know they are secretly seeing a lover, or watch a specific type of porn or spend half their time at work browsing HN. Some of those will have real life ramifications.
better, what if they find that they don't support BLM!
For each of us that runs their own physical servers (and make your less technical friends use them!) we grow stronger.
Use matrix.org (or whatever you believe in), self-host email, promote cryptocurrency.
https://searx.github.io/searx/
I choose to hope the war is not fully lost, yet. But the borders are closing in.
I advice against them, generally. Only if transactions in your country are severely limited, but then you live in an unfree country already. Cryptocurrencies have a tendency to be abused for speculation, and are bad for the environment.
My worry isn't my own government; I'm worried about [some] other governments, and very large corporations.
Money is a means of communication; we use it as a medium and metric for communicating value.
Unless we have truly fungible cryptocurrency as an alternative to corporate or government digital currency, all our private finances are inseparable from the surveillance machine that is now slowly emerging from adtech and fusing with capital control/KYC/AML systems.
Don’t look at where you are today, but where we are as a global community in 10 years.
Now, in a free society, I don't see a good reason why one should be afraid the government can snoop around my financial transactions. I believe I currently live in such a free society. If I want, I can buy a dildo or latex costume in an Amsterdam sex shop within an hour tomorrow, and I am not going to have to be shy about that. I don't live in a country where, for example, gay people get beaten up regularly. I'm not gay myself, btw, but I've experimented a fair share with my sexuality when I was younger. I also used to buy legal drugs online, and I just paid by IBAN. Do I want my employer to know such? Well, I'd like to have the choice to do so, and I have this choice as it is.
I can think of some very good reasons to use cryptocurrency in my free country, and none of these are valid from a legal PoV (avoiding taxation, buy illegal drugs/weapons/etc ie. criminal behaviour). By using cryptocurrency where other means work perfectly fine, I add noise to the cryptocurrency data, and it isn't in my interest to add this noise as I am not a proponent of things such as avoiding taxation or criminal behaviour.
Furthermore, nothing what you say addresses the other points:
> Cryptocurrencies have a tendency to be abused for speculation, and are bad for the environment.
These cons still exist, and need to be put on the weight with the privacy aspect. Which can be a valid argument in an unfree society, such as for example Belarus or China.
Maybe in a year or so it'll be mature to bring people over.
The more we try to use it, the faster that will happen. Meet someone new and if you're going to stay in touch, propose Matrix as your first preference and eventually settle on what both of you feel OK with. Every little bit helps spreading awareness and eventually adoption.
I don't see why Discord would be the first of its kind to be that big eternally.
If the records exist, and you're not guilty of the crime, hope exists that you could be cleared.
Doesn't it make more sense for one's worst fear to be accused of something for which you are innocent but have no alibi?
Agent 1: There was a shooting on 5th st.
Agent 2: Just use the phone records to look up everyone in the area and then arrest them at their work in front of their boss.
Agent 1: It's ok to do this because the innocent will surely have a way to prove their innocence.
Agent 2: But what if it looks bad that we are arresting so many innocent people?
Agent 1: In every legal system there are always more crimes than can be prosecuted. The discretion of prosecutors is an important legal function. If we arrest someone embarrassing, we'll just find something to charge them with.
Agent 2: Yeah and contact with federal agents also _generates_ more crime, like lying to one of us is a felony, right?
Agent 1: Hope they have the $250k it takes to defend against a federal felony.
* The agents laugh *
* Scene end
Or as they currently do: lie about their detainees doing crimes and/or plant contraband
Well it clearly does....
But I think the point being made is that part of the issue is lazy policing/detective work. The concern about privacy is really about the concern of __abuse__ of data. Why many of us want to protect our data is that we do not trust those in power, nor current nor potential future rulers (a big concern). Such instances as the above example are abuse of that data, as well as abuse of power. The thought is that if they are going to abuse us, we're going to make it more difficult. Dragnet operations make the above easier, not the same level of difficulty.
Give a bad cop a gun and they'll shoot someone.
Give a bad cop a swat van and they'll raid a teenager's home, kill their dog and brother.
I'm tired of this binary perspective. It is common but in bad faith. The tools matter. Different tools enable different levels of abuse. Yes, cops shouldn't abuse citizens and we should do our best to stop that. But do you expect to find a perfect solution? If not, then we should also ensure that when a bad cop slips through, they are limited in the damage they can do.
There was nothing in that example that was specifically linked to data collection. You could have had the exact same situation except they are rounding up Black people as suspects. The problem there is bad cops not dangerous tools. The tool is irrelevant in the example.
https://nypost.com/2017/09/23/how-curb-your-enthusiasm-saved...
Nevermind that it had a good end. Recognize that even though there was reasonable doubt as a near impossibility of this man being guilty, the prosecutor still desperately tried to throw him in prison, despite him obviously being the wrong person and the prosecutor almost succeeded!
> But that wasn’t enough for the LAPD and the prosecutor — who had never lost a case and was going to push for the death penalty for Puebla’s murderer.
He did get some compensation:
> In 2007, Juan received $320,000 in a settlement of his civil lawsuit against the LAPD and the city of Los Angeles for false imprisonment, misconduct and defamation. (In 2008, gang member Raul Robledo received a life term for the murder.
But it's outrageous we, the taxpayers, have to pay for police misconduct. Let it come out of their pension fund (and reduce their pensions accordingly).
This isn't even about that. Yes, if someone powerful wants to make your life hard, your life is going to be hard.
Now consider what happens if they just don't care whether you live or die. Some system is set up to "solve crimes" as "efficiently" as possible. The same sort of system that gets used to issue YouTube copyright strikes against the original creators or public domain works because Hollywood put a copy in a motion picture, or mark every email sent by a perfectly legitimate small private email server as spam.
The police increase their "solve rate" dramatically -- by putting a ton of innocent people in prison. Because now instead of unsolved crimes they have "evidence" which, even if it's all circumstantial garbage, is enough to coerce guilty pleas out of defendants who can't afford a good lawyer or don't want to risk having the penalty quintupled if they demand their day in court and lose, or would rather spend six months in prison than pay six years worth of wages to a lawyer.
> If the records exist, and you're not guilty of the crime, hope exists that you could be cleared.
Only you can't get access to the records, because they're sensitive for all sorts of reasons, e.g. because having them in the aggregate would allow you to locate people in witness protection or unmask undercover law enforcement or case targets for espionage or theft. So you can't give access to everything to everybody, which means it only gets used as evidence for the prosecution because they can get it and you can't.
> Doesn't it make more sense for one's worst fear to be accused of something for which you are innocent but have no alibi?
In principle they still have to prove your guilt even if you don't have an alibi. Think about it, a large proportion of crimes are committed at night when most people are at home asleep.
Meanwhile, data under your control is generally only useful as evidence of guilt, because otherwise they just argue that it was under your control. If your phone was at the location of the crime, they argue you were there. If your phone was at home 200 miles from the location of the crime, they argue you knew you were about to commit a crime and left your phone at home. It's used to hurt you but not to help you.
The more technical details of recordkeeping or surveillance that there are, the more likely a frame-up will have flaws that people notice.
But if no records exist, you will not be a suspect in the first place.
Based on what? Why is it so hard for everyone to believe that the regular public, who haven't spent much time thinking about the complex implications of the eroding of privacy, just doesn't care that much? If they think about it at all, they calculate that is extremely unlikely it will ever negatively impact them.
Whether they're right or wrong, that's what they think. Now what makes you think they're actually being driven by some kind of defense mechanism?
Legislation is really working right now, with Congress sitting on 400+ bills and refusing to vote on them, and with known members of the government, including the actual President of the United States of America, committing crimes and the top law enforcement agent doing worse than nothing about it.
Laws work in a society that values them. Once you throw that away, your authoritarians will do whatever fits their needs. And surprise, the authoritarians are doing just that right now.
It’s really not that complicated. If sufficient political will existed to enact stronger clearer privacy protections, legislation would be drafted and approved rapidly, and there is no reason Generating that political will is another matter.
Better option is using simple privacy tools. VPN, incognito browsing, vetting apps and permissions and avoid Google services.
I am doing everything I can, depending on how much free time I have. Using Qubes OS, Whonix, buying GNU/Linux phones etc... Searching with DuckDuckGo, using Firefox, OpenStreeMap etc...
If you read a number of federal search warrant applications, you will see how flimsy and inaccurate they often are. Judges aren’t in the habit of saying no to the FBI very often.
No, they can't. That's a bunch of conspiracy theory gobbledygook not supported by any documents. https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...
If you are an American or in the US, they must obtain a warrant to get your data from Google.
> In response to outcry over PRISM, the U.S. director of national intelligence has released some details. Among other things, he says the government "does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers" and that PRISM-related activities are conducted "under court supervision."
“unilaterally” is how the first is true: the providers participate and generate the data dumps for them. “supervision” is how the second is true: supervision is NOT a warrant.
You have to be careful with the wording. I never claimed they had direct access. PRISM is a program that allows them to download account contents via a special app, which is integrated by these companies, with the cooperation of the companies participating.
Google joined the PRISM program on 14 January, 2009, and were assigned the identifier prefix P3.
PRISM collection does not require real search warrants, as it falls under Section 702 authorization, authorized by congress in 2018 until 2023 presently.
https://www.eff.org/702-spying
They do indeed get the account information downloads directly from the participating companies. They do not have direct access to the companies’ servers (outside of the servers that run the PRISM integration, and perhaps not even direct access to those other than being able to submit PRISM data request jobs).
The net effect is the same.
Note that being American or being located in the US is insufficient protection against PRISM due to the way Section 702 works in practice as applied by the NSA. This is one of the reasons cited by Snowden about why he came forward: this secret new interpretation of FISA gutted previous warrantless search protections for Americans, sidestepping them entirely.
No, it isn't. Where did you get this ridiculous notion? PRISM is a data integration program between the NSA and the FBI. It shows this right in Snowden's leaked slides. https://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2014/10/05/c3fe17c5-4c...
The FBI sends a data request for specific accounts' data to the data provider. The data provider's lawyers review the request and if nothing is amiss, they configure a wiretap on those accounts that sends data to the FBI. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
> Note that being American or being located in the US is insufficient protection against PRISM due to the way Section 702 works in practice as applied by the NSA.
Huh? There is no secret interpretation that allows Section 702 requests to violate the Fourth Amendment. The only program in Snowden's leaks that illegally collected Americans' data was the phone metadata program.
I also had this "I've nothing to hide instance" - not that I don't have my own nudes on my phone/Google drive/WhatsApp/telegram but because I know there are very corrupt people whoes greed knows no limit.
Surveillance is obviously going to harm my privacy but I am prepared to give it away for greater good atleast the terrorists and other corrupt government officials will not be able to hide behind the privacy which commoners have demanded for themselves.
"What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us [...] is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?"
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capit...
I've done this dance before. It is the cleanest way to turn over evidence of a crime that is discovered in a private investigation.
I call bullshit. There’s no way he’s the only one that searched for those terms in that time period, right?
If you search for "[government agency] mailing address" three days before they receive anthrax in the mail, it isn't a slam dunk case. But if it was also mailed from your zip code, you had placed 6 phone calls to that agency in the prior month, etc. it makes you a pretty damn good candidate.
There has been some interest throughout the last five years. The first big spike was the first week of May, 2016. However, there were smaller peaks in March and April.
Imagine being the unibombers neighbor and getting arrested for the crimes because you searched for the same things he did.
> wholly, exclusively. a selection based purely on merit
---
> A popular misconception is that circumstantial evidence is less valid or less important than direct evidence
because you know ... knowing that a person's phone was in the vicinity at a specific time in a specific area is as strong as a video of person A killing person B.
Such a common "misconception".
Furthermore, we know that people get wrongly convicted. We know this because they get exonerated down the road. It's also a tautology. "It's ok to use circumstantial evidence to get convictions because the legal system currently uses circumstantial evidence to get convictions".
Some of us don't want to go to jail because we happened to be driving through the wrong place at the wrong time.
Usually this would be circumstantial evidence because you have to infer it was actually person A and B in the video, and it actually depicted the murder. There could be alternative explanations, such as "that was my twin" or "we were performing a murder on stage".
Indeed, the common metaphor for the strongest possible evidence in any case—the "smoking gun"—is an example of proof based on circumstantial evidence Similarly, fingerprint evidence, videotapes, sound recordings, photographs, and many other examples of physical evidence that support the drawing of an inference, i.e., circumstantial evidence, are considered very strong possible evidence
The heart of the case is the presentation of evidence. There are two types of evidence -- direct and circumstantial.
Direct evidence usually is that which speaks for itself: eyewitness accounts, a confession, or a weapon.
Circumstantial evidence usually is that which suggests a fact by implication or inference: the appearance of the scene of a crime, testimony that suggests a connection or link with a crime, physical evidence that suggests criminal activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_evidence
In direct evidence, a witness relates what they directly experienced.
Circumstantial evidence, by contrast, consists of a fact or set of facts which, if proven, will support the creation of an inference that the matter asserted is true.
https://youtu.be/4xGluGlQgdA?t=310
Direct evidence, often in the form of eyewitness testimony, can be extraordinarily weak. On the contrary, DNA evidence, for example, is 100% circumstantial.
Why not? Why would anyone search for both dcleaks and guccifer months before dcleaks was a web site or guccifer was a persona?
What’s the spike on May 5 there? It’s 12 days earlier.
If the answer is that Google and Facebook have logs and the ISP doesn’t, that’s another whole conversation, especially if they can be linked back to a specific individual like in this case. I doubt anyone would be ok with having a lifetime search history.
Because permanent logs don't contain full addresses, because of GDPR.
> But I can’t think of a prior case where the feds unambiguously acknowledged using Google search logs this way: to, apparently, zero in on people who searched the wrong word at the wrong time.
You can always make a slippery slope argument, but it doesn't make it reasonable.
Why/why not will scope increase in this particular way? What temptations are there? What safeguards are there?
What's the difference between a trend and a slippery slope?
The reality is that when you have unrestricted access to anyone’s life, you can make them a criminal, whether by framing or surreptitiously surveillance. There’s a reason why a principle of our legal system is that you must first have reasonable suspicion of a crime before you investigate.
There is no free lunch in this problem. You have to consistently protect yourself and your household network to avoid tracking. Also you will probably never be able to stop it fully. Understanding the ecosystem and how tracking works will help a lot and understanding your individual tolerance for tracking is crucial. I personally think it's hygienic to test out anti-tracking measures and I go for sprints with all of them running but also I use the internet like a nearly normal user a lot of the time.
If you want to take steps to learn more a good place to start is using an old computer or raspberry pi and try out some network level filtering like PiHole, having separate networks for IoT devices/mobile devices/home users/guests and doing routing to a VPN you set up yourself via a cloud host selectively for traffic, times of day, and device.
“Don’t be evil” presumes a lot when there are organizations that have machine guns and legal jurisdiction over you, and a public, decades-long track record of doing evil.
Law enforcement has always been able to subpoena this type of information. From phone companies, credit card companies, ISPs, etc. If Google wants to legally operate in the United States then they don't have any choice but to comply.
The bigger issue, IMO, is that nobody has any idea who else has access to this information. Google can share this information with anybody. It's entirely on good faith that people trust them not to.
Take private owner gun sales. You have to collect the information of the person you're selling it to. You can't not collect it, and if you take the attitude that you won't, you yourself can be held criminally liable.
If we had cryptoanarchy -- unbreakable encryption, with everything on device, anonymous, and any server services using some future form of fully homomorphic encryption, and with financial transactions done with pseudo-anonymous cryptocoin, you'd find this to be a very unstable situation, and most world governments, even European governments, would quickly pass laws to require the ability to track identity, de-anonymize, and subpoena logs.
There is no way any of the Western democracies are going to move to a system where all records of activity are ephemeral and un-subpoenable.
You do remember that Google is an Ad company, and information is the product, right?
One would have to be a total fool to think that an internal prohibition on evil would be at all meaningful, even if somehow it were strictly adhered to. Literally nobody at Google is willing to be imprisoned to defy the orders of the nation in which its situated.
(Before you point out that it requires judicial oversight: please read a dozen federal search warrants. The standard for search warrants is hilaribad, and feds suffer no consequences whatsoever for putting whatever fantasies they want into their applications for same.)
"Don't be evil," was always a gimmick, IMO.
Not sure there's any real solution, though. As long as there's a government, there's going to be somebody who thinks it's evil.
Always? It struck me that it was a genuine creed for a burgeoning tech company who recognised established tech companies were evil, and so were themselves endeavouring to be "not evil".
Consider their business model from day 1. It didn't take long before the allegations of email data mining started to surface.
Also, "evil" is such a subjective word that it's almost meaningless with no context.