Google and Microsoft have agreed WITH government consent, that the only way to save face is to blame the government and pretend like they're suing and making a big fuss over it. Microsoft and Google do not give a single fuck about your privacy, they were happy selling you out to the feds until Snodewn outed them while they had their pants down. Google's reaction has been especially ridiculous. Acting like a cheating husband, OMG who the fuck put this spying thing in here, get this woman off my bed NOW!
Who said the tech companies don't want to cooperate with the government?
Every CEO in this Country wants to be invited to one of those dinners with Obama, where Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg and the Google people sat at a table with the man himself.
Every CEO in this Country dreams of being influential in Congress, getting invited to discuss serious issues, getting special State-level protections for their businesses in China, Russia, elsewhere....
Companies won't go to "war" against government surveillance, all they want is better guarantees that their cooperation will not be leaked and in case its leaked, they want the government to take the blame, just like Apple, Google and others have done after the NSA leaks, they pose as victims of a strong government, when in reality they're partners.
The leaked papers offer a tiny glimpse into the tip of a gigantic hidden iceberg. We don't realy know the size of these institutions and that is cause for concern, IMO, as in a democracy all these things should be known to the public. Their activities may be confidential, but their administrative data should not. The fact that we need leaks in order to know such things means the democracy needs urgent reform.
If you are curious about math but never took on a college level course, I highly recommend you take Prof. Devlin's Intro to Math Thinking Coursera course, starting in sept.
His classes are superb, his teaching is clear as can be and you get to have a Stanford teacher teach you college level math even if you've never liked math before.
Take his course, it'll help you tons even if you do something totally unrelated to math.
In my day a framework was a major piece of generic software used to deploy databases, large scale data flow and service millions of reequests per minute.
These days you write a fucking preprocessed CSS file, a few JS helper functions and it's a framework.
Even if the only purpose is to propagate absurdly naive and ineffective ideas?
What, google and apple "fighting" the US Government they've gladly been cooperating with since forever???
Why doesn't Schneier call them out for what these corporations really are, government snitches? What makes Schneier think any of these companies want to do what's "moral"??
This article is one of the most naive pieces I've ever read. It parts on the principle that these companies want to do what's moral, but the government is keeping them from doing it. That is absurd.
Google, Apple and friends have been willingly cooperating with the government in exchange for perks, for immunity against FTC probes and so on. They're NOT gonna "fight" because they have nothing to fight against.
Fucking Google is manipulating these threads, trying to white wash their secret spying deals.
Don't fall for this bullshit, Google has been in the spying business for ages now. They joined the NSA program in 2009 and have been in trouble constantly in every spy scandal there is some google product involved. Wake up already.
The leaked slides say clearly the government can query the servers at will. They get real time login data, logout data and payload data.
I don't know why people keep putting this into question, giving Google the benefit of the doubt, when they were caught pants down, no questions asked.
If the companies mentioned in the slides just complied with the law, why would they be singled out in those slides? Honoring search warrants and FISA requests is an obligation, not an extra.
The reason Google was singled out as a partner since 2009 is because they gave the government full unrestricted access.
These guys optimized some JS and you called it "reinvent the WWW". Ridiculous.