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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

For all those complaining about the language of this and other denials, what could possibly satisfy you? This seems as blanket as possible.

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process."

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale [as of the Verizon order] is completely false."

Finally, NSLs cannot compel an organization to lie like this, and doing so would be very legally dangerous for Google.

It's amazing how little critical thinking HN does when we see something that confirms our beliefs.

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Huh? This is the direct result of the governments toxic conduct. They issue orders that forbid you from talking about having received any such order, they classify everything (to the point where a parallel society to the tune of 1M people exist that have access to (e.g.) cables, as became apparent during the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables row), they institute secret courts, laws with secret interpretations..

They have poisoned public discourse beyond repair, and you make it sound like a conspiracy theory.

At this point, it pretty much is a conspiracy theory. The only evidence we have of these companies' involvement is the leaked slides, which could have been the result of over-promising from a contractor or a misunderstanding from a non-technical manager. We have a lot of evidence to the contrary, particular that nearly every company allegedly involved has issued strong denials, which, again, they cannot be compelled to do by NSLs.

We can't conflate everything the government or the NSA does. This program seems unlikely for a number of reasons, including the conspiracy aspect (quite a lot of engineers working for Google, Apple, etc. would have to be in on it) and the technical challenges involved. Do you have any idea how much data Google produces? How complicated their infrastructure is?

I'm the first to believe that the one thing saving us from the surveillance state is the unlimited technical incompetence of our watchmen. To that tune, when I hear about stuff like ThinThread or other surveillance fantasies, I think of upper management losers dreaming up Java Enterprise systems that only ever achieve to convert gigantic amounts of energy into waste heat.

That still doesn't mean we can accept the government lieing to us or hiding basic information, just because we believe they are harmless kids way over their head.

No, it's not a conspiracy theory.

1) James Clapper admitted Prism is real

2) Of course such a program would involve the top Internet companies, who in the world else would it involve (the smallest Internet companies?)

> Do you have any idea how much data Google produces? How complicated their infrastructure is?

For a continuous activity stream, a single fiber would do. How many queries and mails do you think google processes per second?

I found somewhere that they have 4 billion queries per day. I put 100 bytes per query, that translates to a measly 5MB/s. For emails I estimated 10% of 300 billion (some figures I found somewhere), with 10KB/email that translates to 3GB/s.

A single fiber optic cable contains many fibers each carrying at least 1TB/s. It's easily doable in a stealth way. They don't need to use more than 1% of a single fibre.

Obama confirmed in a press conference that PRISM exists, so concluding the program is imaginary would seem to require a fair lack of critical thinking.

Could you quote/link to Obama's confirmation that Prism exists, and also the claim that it is imaginary?

> Could you quote/link to Obama's confirmation that Prism exists

I'll give you gizmodo because it has specifically the quotes http://gizmodo.com/president-obamas-prism-response-wont-make...

None of those seem to have anything to do with PRISM. This is a confusing situation, because two secret surveillance programs were leaked on subsequent days. These seem to be related to the first leaked program, which involves collection of Verizon's call metadata. That seems pretty clear-cut. Verizon has issued a non-denial, it's in line with what we've known about the NSA's conduct since 9/11, and various members of congress and the executive branch have commented on it.

PRISM is a completely separate issue and one I'm much more skeptical about. I also haven't seen anybody specifically admit to PRISM's existence, so I'd be interested if you can find a better source.

I stand corrected

How about someone with even better knowledge on it than Obama?

"The top intelligence official in the United States condemned as “reprehensible” leaks revealing a secret program to collect information from leading Internet companies"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/intelligence-chief-call...

Did he confirm PRISM exists, or the court order to Verizon? These are separate things. The Verizon story came first, followed by PRISM separately, less than a day later. Many people seem to be conflating the two.

In order to consider the possibility that this is clever language avoiding the truth of the issue, can someone explain how a system might work where google maintains plausible deniability while allowing access to the information it collects?

I have a naive understanding of how the internet works at the physical layer, but it seems like it would be trivial to create a system that allows for this statement to be true and for the data to actually be captured.

For an oversimplified, spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum example: if the user is the source in a passive optical network[1] and both the nsa and google are targets, google has not provided access to their data to the nsa, the user has.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network

edit: And what would a statement of denial that is inclusive of all possible arrangements sound like? I think that any statement that asserts a one-to-one correspondence between you and google would be unrealistic.

Larry Page wants to live. And he wants Google to keep functioning as a company, and not e.g., to have sudden tax issues crop up with the IRS. He has plenty of incentive to tell an out-and-out lie in this case.

Oh come on. Google is willing and able to push back on overly broad governmental requests. When the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 companies in 2005 asking for months of user queries, Google was the only company I know of that fought back in court and won. I know because I wrote a declaration for that case. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/doj-sent-subpoenas-to-34-compa...; and http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-responds-to-doj-subpoen...; for example.

We were also the first company to publish our transparency report on governmental requests, and the first company to include any specific number ranges on the number of national security letter (NSLs) that we get.

See also http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/google-fights-nsl&#...; about national security letters. The appropriate and constructive place to channel frustation is at bad laws/legal provisions.

Matt, I know you really love Google but you need to do a bit more research:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-...

like, say, into the actual source of that story[1] instead of the wired blog writeup? For instance, the part that explicitly talks about limiting the share of information to the Chinese intrusion and not user data?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870404150457504...

I'm sorry but that article talks about how Google and NSA worked together when the accounts of Chinese activist were being hacked.

How is that related to helping the US government spy on its citizens?

Cutts said:

> push back on overly broad governmental requests

> publish our transparency report on governmental requests

and also mentioned Google 'fighting back' at National Security Letters.

The fact that courts have upheld secrecy between NSA and Google before (just the one we know about) is quite relevant.

There are bad things at play here and just because Google has a cute, colorful logo and hires nerds doesn't make them innocent either.

Equating the allegations denied in this post to the response to an attack by a nation state against Google is kind of like comparing reporting a robbery to the police to criminally conspiring with them.

Google just recently got out from under anti-trust scrutiny. It would be trivial for the Feds to bust Google's chops using that at any time. They've got Google's number any day of the week now. Step out of line, suddenly a new anti-trust inquiry begins.

Pedants gonna be pedantic.

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