Americans let the Patriot Act be passed into law, not Google. Stop blaming Google and start blaming your democratically elected government. People now have more privacy and liberty in continental Europe and Canada than they do in the US.
At the time this letter was released, the Wall Street crowd called BS. I remember the uproar. I was hoping that Google would usher in a different era of corporate governance; one in which corporate balance sheets don't have tunnel vision towards "the bottom line" but take into account the bigger picture. I was wrong. Yesterday I started procuring servers in order to host a lot of the services that Google provides for me like email. It might not mean much but it's my own little way of protesting what I believe to be pure hypocrisy coming from Google.
Taken from: http://www.secinfo.com/d14D5a.148c8.htm#645a
DON’T BE EVIL
Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.
MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE
We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. In pursuing this goal, we will always be mindful of our responsibilities to our shareholders, employees, customers and business partners. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail, which provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. We know that some people have raised privacy concerns, primarily over Gmail’s targeted ads, which could lead to negative perceptions about Google. However, we believe Gmail protects a user’s privacy. By releasing services, such as Gmail, for free, we hope to help bridge the digital divide. AdWords connects users and advertisers efficiently, helping both. AdSense helps fund a huge variety of online web sites and enables authors who could not otherwise publish. Last year we created Google Grants—a growing program in which hundreds of non-profits addressing issues, including the environment, poverty and human rights, receive free advertising. And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google’s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.
...and yet they don't. Google is quite Good in many scenarios where they could easily get away with being Evil. You've implied that they have "tunnel vision towards the bottom line", but I think you'd be hard-pressed to support that point.
Just like Google is putting their lobbyists where their interests are in cases where government intervention (or lack of it) is hurting their business (net neutrality, open mobile applications, visas, wireless spectrum, etc), they should also fight against the Patriot Act.
If people don't feel comfortable using Google's products due to fear of government spying, they will restrict their search, clean their cookies, block adsense/analytics, etc, all of which will impact Google financially.