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Are you bothering to read these things, or just searching for the term "direct access" and calling it a day? From the statement: "Regardless of the circumstan
by necubi 13y ago
Are you bothering to read these things, or just searching for the term "direct access" and calling it a day?
From the statement:
"Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it."
From Google's:
"Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false. "
What about that is weasely or unclear to you? They categorically deny providing broad data to the government. Of course they can't say they don't provide any access, because they're obligated by law to comply with warrants. But the accusation was that they provide direct access (those words that you all are so obsessed with appear in the Guardian article), with the implication that the NSA can just go and take whatever data it wants with no oversight.
Unless you believe that Apple, Google, et al. are just plain lying, that is clearly not the case.
- vidarh 13y agoNotice that the paragraphs immediately before that specifically talks about data passed to law enforcement and plays down the type of requests, after the paragraph before that talks about national security. Since when would anyone start to lump NSA in with "law enforcement". The focus on law enforcement in general in that statement is curious since that's not really what all the noise has been about. Maybe their PR team are just a bunch of buffoons that have still not realised that these statements gets dissected, but it is rather odd that they when releasing a statement to try to stem criticism based on their previous choice of words again choose wording that is so ambiguous In fact, if I were to trust this (and I can't decide if I should), my main reason for trusting them is that I'm wondering if they wouldn't just flat out lie and give a much stronger denial if they are in fact feeding the NSA with tons of data.
- Intermernet 13y agoI didn't know this until a minute ago, but it seems that the NSA have a Police branch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_agencies#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_agencie... and http://www.nsa.gov/careers/faqs/ http://www.nsa.gov/careers/faqs/). I wonder if they serve their requests via that branch, or another. it'd be convenient to serve the requests from a more bureaucratic branch of the agency in order to allow them to fall outside of "law enforcement requests".
- vidarh 13y agoAs far as I know, that is a police force that police the NSA offices, seeing as there's obvious security concerns about letting police that don't have the right security clearances onto their grounds.
- jpalomaki 13y agoI think the rules said the companies are not allowed to disclose the exact amount of FISA requests. Instead they need to bundle them together with other requests from law enforcement.
- vidarh 13y agoThey are not saying they are bundling them together - they are saying these are requests from law enforcement. It could just be a sloppy PR department, who knows.
- amirmc 13y agoSince multiple PR depts are saying largely the same thing, I'm inclined to believe this is what they've been informed they can release.
- stiff 13y agoAre you bothering to read these things, or just searching for the term "direct access" and calling it a day? Are you bothering to understand what the OP was trying to say or just trolling and calling it a day? I didn't express any personal opinion on whether Google or Apple leak large amounts of data or not, and in fact I don't have any. I just can understand people wondering about the usage of this phrase and was trying to explain their possible motives.
- chaz 13y agoThe phrase "direct access" gets special attention because it's in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the original Guardian article. The companies didn't make up the qualification -- they're repeating the accusation back and refuting it.
- university 13y agoThat is if you choose to believe Google, which it sounds like you do. And that's perfectly natural because the alternative is too scary and infuriating to consider. It's not much different than being mugged (it happened to me). The victim's first natural instinct is to believe that the perpetrator won't hurt them if they just hand over their wallet. It's easier that way, but people still get hurt. Believing Google doesn't change the fact that you are the victim and that it may get much worse for you.