Comment by alexvr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexvr | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ???

At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.

The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal.

Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki.

Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game.

Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.

So it's like the KGB, but worse (the KGB didn't kill careers because you had sex). Living in a country from the former communist bloc, I can tell you what the endgame looks like. It looks like 60% of the population willingly collaborating with the security service and writing reports for them. If I were American, the first thing I'd do is convert to mormonism.

Facebook has internal teams and tools used to do searches on activity of users, when law enforcement requests come in FB looks at the request and makes a judgement on whether to comply with it. They supply information such as when and from what IP a user logged in, and can provide user content - however I do not know to what extent they provide it.

Nothing gets deleted from FB. So the data is there for a long time - further, FB is careful about where they build datacenters and hold the data so as to ensure that FB is the owner of the data, and not subject to some foreign government claiming that they own the data of their national users.

Google surely has the same team, tools and procedures.

What about Dropbox? and Box? How do these companies deal with this whole situation? FB has an entire .gov policy/interfacing office in DC - do these other companies as well?

> however I do not know to what extent they provide it.

Probably in the same form they do for law enforcement. A little booklet with every photo ever uploaded (deleted or otherwise), every message, location and IP address the user has ever used, every single click they have made in the interface. Seriously.

Here's an example booklet, complete with redactions.

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/88465177?access_key=key-247...

The link gave me an error 400: bad request message. I changed the ending of the url from recommendation=false to recommendations=true, and it worked. Just in case anyone was attempting to see the proof.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com