What people were worried about, a "dragnet" that allows arbitrary access and intercept of any user data by the NSA turns out to be false.
Unless you think you can use SFTP to upload, in real time, all traffic on Google services.
I bet that the bombshell disclosure will be that these 'proper legal warrants' are actually just arbitrary requests justified via the Patriot Act or similar.
Now the scenario is: They must obtain NSL/FISA orders, Google reviews them, then the data on their target is released.
Is that a dragnet? What if when Google wins the right to publish statistics on NSL/FISA requests, it turns out to be just a few hundred per year, or less than regular search warrants, like when a guy is suspected of killing his wife.
Would that change your opinion? It seems that the pitchforks came out on the original WashPo/Guardian scenario, and if that turns out to be wrong, people will keep moving the goal posts and not put the pitchforks away.
Some people just want to believe that the tech companies are greedy, unscrupulous, entities.
There's nothing Google could say or do to clear their name on this. The NSA, Congress or the Executive branch need to detail the level of access and the form of access that the NSA has to Google's information in order to clear Google's name. Even that unfortunately has to be taken with a large grain of salt.
There's simply too much information pointing towards mass surveillance with assistance from US companies to believe what the companies themselves say. This is a shitty position for Google to be in but consumers didn't put them in it, the US government did by admitting to the PRISM slides being correct without detailing how the companies mentioned on them are involved.
> If there was a dragnet it is very likely that they
> legally are not allowed to admit it as per terms of
> the court order.
> The NSA, Congress or the Executive branch need to
> detail the level of access and the form of access
> that the NSA has to Google's information in order
> to clear Google's name.
Realistically I'm not sure what the NSA would share with anyone that could be conclusive. But a logical explanation of how the NSA gets into data without corporate cooperation and that explanation matching up with the timeline presented on the one slide would be a great start.
For instance, you could argue that the PRISM timeline is simply showing once the NSA had filters in place to identify and capture general internet traffic headed to and from those specific companies. But this has a large hole in that why would Google, a company who's search queries would be highly valued, come so far after Microsoft on the timeline. So an explanation that addresses the large questions like that.
As opposed to the current situation which is a credible leak that makes Google look very bad, an executive branch that is defending the information in the leak as being legal and Google flat out denying any involvement.
It takes what the company was doing manually before PRISM (complying with NSLs and FISA warrants)...
and automates part of that process.
What it doesn't do is insert NSA as a wiretap into all their systems's traffic, as that's not what FISA compliance needed in the first place.
This is correct.
There is a difference between people lying, compelling silence, and being forced to lie.
The government can force people to be silent, be it upcoming raids, targets of investigations that they don't want tipped off, etc.
I know of zero legal authority that allows the government to force people to actively lie.
If anyone here does, i'd love to see it.
There is in fact, authority that the government cannot compel false or misleading statements. None that i'm aware of in the national security context, but this actually comes up quite a bit in the abortion context.
For example, Casey vs. Planned parenthood and others make it very clear the government cannot compel you to speak misleading information.
Opinions argue about what is false and what is misleading, but that is clearly not an issue here.
Of course it is. It's not proof, but it's evidence. It shifts the probability towards "there is no dragnet" by some amount. Maybe it's not significant, but it's there.