There's also the curiously peculiar, and consistent, wording from companies that deny their involvement in programs such as PRISM [1]. As people seem to have fo

There's also the curiously peculiar, and consistent, wording from companies that deny their involvement in programs such as PRISM [1]. As people seem to have forgotten about PRISM, NSA slides not meant for public consumption stated it enabled "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. But here's the fun part. Here are the corporate denials: - Google: "We have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government direct access to our servers." - Apple: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers." - Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers." And so on. An exploit with plausible deniability enables these companies to make these comments completely truthfully, and at least mostly truthfully if they claim they are not providing a backdoor. But more to the point, there is absolutely no reason these companies would all say "direct access" as that's very specifically a subset of "access." If you do not facilitate direct or indirect access, why would you not simply say access? If this were a one-off thing, that'd be one thing since on occasion some PR is... odd. But literally all the companies were saying the exact same very peculiar thing. That's not a coincidence. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...