12 ms·
Microsoft's June 7th statement: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In
by pvnick 13y ago
Microsoft's June 7th statement:
"We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it."
One down, several to go. If I were Google/Facebook/Yahoo executives I would be very worried right now as to what soon-to-be-released revelations say about their NSA cooperation. Sure, they may have only done that which was compelled by FISC order, but that won't preclude them from being perceived as culpable.
- thenewkid 13y agoScroogled!
- devindotcom 13y agoThe interesting conflict to me is that Google et al don't appear to be fighting this battle. When it comes to other things, they are in the streets, funding lobbyists, building protest websites, and so on. But this, which threatens their entire business model (essentially trust-based), they haven't made a peep about. It may just be a gag order thing, sure. But with the level of access required for stuff like this, I don't think they could shut the whole team up. How many people worked on this Microsoft back door? It can't have been less than a couple dozen at least. And none of them raised the issue or let someone know, a journalist for instance, or publicly raised the question? It makes me wonder about the true extent of the programs we're freaking out about. I mean, of course they exist and they're big and threatening, but I don't buy that they could combine complete access with complete secrecy. They need the cooperation of the companies, and the companies, by NSA standards, just aren't trustworthy enough. In fact, they're full of wild cards like Snowden, denizens of newsgroups, IRC, 4chan, etc, who would LOVE to be the one to blow up an NSA attempt to write a back door into Skype. Maybe they did, and it all faded away. But it just seems strange to me that so little has been said about the elephant that must surely have been in everyone's room for the last few years.
- znowi 13y agoThe peculiar part for me with Google is that they seem to be somehow immune from all the revelations. People keep stand by it and get annoyed when reminded of their wrong-doings. I suspect at this point, they're not much different than Microsoft. But the "don't be evil" brand is still strong in the mind of many.
- antoko 13y agoSpeaking for myself, but I'm sure others share the sentiments, its not that i think google is somehow "good". They're obviously not, the difference is that they're still a cool tech company doing cool things on a massive scale (or potentially very disruptive). self-driving cars, balloon network testing in NZ, google fiber, and more mundane things like Golang and angular. I don't give them a pass, its just that in the bad column they're the same as all the other actors in this drama, on the good column they're a damn cool tech company that can realistically change the world in fundamental and positive ways. EDIT: also for the most part their interests are selfishly aligned with ours. They want a fast easy open internet. That contrasts pretty sharply with FB/MS/APPLE - who are more about hardware/walled gardens. Though all these lines seem to getting blurred.
- jcarney 13y agoGoogle isn't above doing things that harm people to make them more money. Like the steadily decreasing background contrast and lack of borders separating ads from search results. Older people are far less cognizant of borders and thus would click on ads thinking they're search results. http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/ http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional... They recently got rapped by the FTC for it. http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-is-deceptive.html/?a=viewall http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i... The difference is that the negative Microsoft news tends to float on top of sites like HN more than positive news, and the reverse is true for Google so this alters perceptions of people.
- 13y ago
- lern_too_spel 13y agoThis latest release does not contradict that. They provide user data for accounts under surveillance in real time. To place an account under surveillance, the government needs a valid court order for that account. This document just says that surveillance was broken for chats when they did the outlook.com upgrade, but that has since been fixed.
- Afforess 13y agoIt's interesting to contrast our current attitude with Microsoft/Skype with similar news 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254925 Oh how times change.
- pvnick 13y agoI remember this, has it really been a year? Man, time flies. It is indeed interesting how far the attitudes have shifted.
- mikegerwitz 13y agoWord games; notice the use of the term "voluntary". This also provides some answers to http://www.skypeopenletter.com/ http://www.skypeopenletter.com/.
- vabmit 13y agoWell that quote may be a technically accurate statement. They don't "provide" data directly to the NSA with out a secret FISA order. But, the new leak article seems to suggest that they weaken their cryptography, perhaps turn over private keys, re-architect their topology, and adjust their technology to allow the NSA to trivially easily intercept/get the data of every single Microsoft technology user. A little bird told me that Microsoft was the most "helpful" out of all the big tech companies. If this new article is accurate, I hope that statement also was. I'm rather pro-US/NSA. But, even I find this new leak very disturbing if it's accurate and true. Being realistic, I bet all the other big American tech companies are doing similar things. For example, my thinking is still that FB gives law enforcement a "god view" of all information and communications (even if it is in a round about way, like Microsoft allegedly does).
- mikelat 13y agoWhat's sad that I'm neither surprised nor shocked about Microsoft doing this. If we hear the same about Facebook or Apple I'm not likely to be surprised either. If/when we hear the level of Google's involvement, that will be very interesting, because although a lot of people suspect that Google invades people's privacy, we've never really had any concrete proof or examples of it.
- jaimzob 13y agoHonest question: how does that article contradict that statement? Everyone is bouncing off the walls about this but I honestly can't see where the story is. Microsoft + others enable NSA to access customer data when presented with court order. You can agree or not agree but is it really a shock?
- ig1 13y agoProviding integration to make access easier is part of a voluntary NSA program (Twitter has said they refused to participate).
- bigiain 13y agoI'm probably overly sensitive to this, being a "non-US person", but I'm constantly reading "with a court order" as "either with a court order, or with a 51% suspicion that one of the two parties to the communication is not a US citizen - in which case we can do what we like"