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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Uh uh. So we have something being stated as plain fact which, if true, would have been a major, major story by a journalist not exactly known for holding back in his reporting - yet the particular story was never reported as such (the bit about scaring sources is BS, he could just switch channels which he did anyway).

The only corroborating evidence is drunk hearsay. The supposed fallout is implied. I mean, he just knows that Google read his mail - but he doesn't have any solid ideas if his source who he has a direct relationship was fired?

No matter what one wants to think of Google, there is not a single ounce of meat on this story.

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He risks legal action for libel, given the definitive title of his post "ABOUT THAT TIME GOOGLE SPIED ON MY GMAIL" compared to the indecisive evidence presented.

His "evidence" could just as easily be explained by the fairly common practice of fingerprinting inside information to catch leakers.

And also, I suppose, the fairly common practice of faking an email from an employee to a journalist to show to the employee before he's fired?

"Fantastic job on integrating the psychiatric profile and semantic analysis, everyone. It looks like we were so accurate that we independently faked the exact same email he actually wrote!"

Arrington's exact quote, "shown an email that proved that they were the source" actually doesn't say it was an email between Arrington and the source, although I'm fairly sure that's what was meant.

Edit: To be fair, I suppose we should consider that the average guilty person isn't going to do well when confronted with specific, correct accusations, even if the evidence was faked or incorrect.

No matter what one wants to think of Google, there is not a single ounce of meat on this story.

I'd like to agree. If this was true, this would be very shocking news for me and a lot of other people. I work for one of the many startups, which use google docs and google mail. If Google would be willing to look at journalist's emails to "find a leak". How could any company trust them not to look at their secret communication? Especially if they had a real interest in doing so at some point, so they wanted to launch a competing product, invest in a competitor or acquire the company in question?

Evidence or not, if you find yourself in a situation where a company would gain a significant competitive advantage over you by accessing your communications, it would be just be prudent not to voluntarily store all of that information on that company's servers.

But even assuming the most vile malice on Google's part, the vast, vast majority of the data people store on their services just isn't interesting to them (except to algorithmically process to serve ads).

Exactly. To simplify, this Arrington post leaves only two possible scenarios:

1) He had a huge scoop on his hands but he passed because he was worried about the safety of his business. Something a journalist shouldn't even think about. Unprofessional and proof of a big conflict of interests.

2) He never run the story on TechCrunch because he knew the source was drunken bullshit and couldn't be used for anything that aspired to be called "reporting". Therefore: this post is bullshit because it's based on that same source

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