Well, these are much more interesting links than your last round. So, if your car has been stolen, and also you have evidence that 100 other cars have been sto

Well, these are much more interesting links than your last round. So, if your car has been stolen, and also you have evidence that 100 other cars have been stolen by the same crook, and then you report it to the police, and I go ask the police for comment about your car, and they say "we can't discuss that with you, jholman", does that mean that you have a secret relationship with police? I say no. I think the Google/NSA thing that Wired is refering to is very probably the same type of thing. The NSA are the cops you would go to, if the crook was another entire country. The secrecy the court upheld, reported in your link, was not whether or not Google went to the cops, but whether or not the cops investigated the thing Google asked them to. "If there was nothing to hide, why do they try to hide it?" I agree, and it looks like Google agrees, but the NSA is crazy. The reason we should think that Google agrees is because Google campaigns to increase transparency, arguing that although national security is important, hiding the numbers of NSLs or FISA orders does not improve security, it just makes abuses possible. Almost everybody in the valley is related to In-Q-Tel, emphatically including YCombinator. So, yeah, you're right about the facts on that one. I dunno what to make of it. DARPA funded the internet, too. TOR was designed originally by the Navy. Maybe it's all okay? Maybe we should be worried? It's really not clear. If you want more facts for your conspiracy-theory fire, there was an HN link a day or two ago to a Paul Carr article at Pandodaily, responding to a rant by Arrington. (I think Arrington's piece is fucking retarded, personally, but I bet you'll love it. And I think Carr takes at face value too many of the rumours.) But Carr DOES have some juicy facts about relationships between the intel community and Silicon Valley. I don't draw the same conclusions that you draw, but it's good to have the same facts on the table. I don't think there's anything new to be said about the Wifi/Maps thing. If it was a mistake, as Google alleges, it was obviously an embarrassing one. No one can prove whether it was a mistake or deliberate, though. There's lots of evidence that if Google didn't lie-a-lot then Google was basically not being super-naughty... but if Google was in bed with the NSA then they would have lied really really a lot, and so all that evidence is probably worth nothing. I think that if you look at the history of NSA collaborators, like the telcos, you will NOT find calls for transparency. The denials, yeah, I mean... no denial would convince you, and I guess that's fair. But why don't you apply the same standard of doubt to everyone else, too? Remember that there is basically no evidence that Google has participated in any illegal surveillance, nor any widespread surveillance (legal or otherwise), except for some really vague allegation in five powerpoint slides, where those powerpoint slides ALSO make claims that are obviously false (like claiming you accomplish this amazing panopticon for $20M, which is hilarous). Btw, on a completely irrelevant side-note, I don't think "dissemination" means what you think it means.