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Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand (what on earth does sympathy have to do with it, especially for Eric Schmidt? it's user data

Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand (what on earth does sympathy have to do with it, especially for Eric Schmidt? it's user data the NSA is copying) Meanwhile, I'll point out once again the rest of what he said, in which he warned everyone of the dangers of cloud computing due to the powers enabled by the Patriot Act. But no, no one wanted to talk about that. Too easy to go for the sound bite. > Q: "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" > Schmidt: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."

DanBC 13y ago
He made a business out of making user data easy to grep, in order to serve ads. I guess when he started he (along with everyone else) didn't think the NSA would be quite so blatantly illegally slurping data. There's a big difference between having to hand over data because a judge has approved a valid legal request, vs having a weird secret court forcing a black box onto your network. But still, Google is chock full of smart people and if any company is able to sort out easier encryption it's Google, and they haven't done that. (Although I accept what tptacek says here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641483 )
- moron4hire 13y ago
  the problem is, as far as anyone with the power to do anything about it is concerned, what the NSA did was completely legal. They also claim the power to not explain to us why it's legal. Or to explain the rules by which they decide what is legal. But the end result is the same: they have effectively proven that voting is a waste of time.

DanBC 13y ago

He made a business out of making user data easy to grep, in order to serve ads. I guess when he started he (along with everyone else) didn't think the NSA would be quite so blatantly illegally slurping data. There's a big difference between having to hand over data because a judge has approved a valid legal request, vs having a weird secret court forcing a black box onto your network. But still, Google is chock full of smart people and if any company is able to sort out easier encryption it's Google, and they haven't done that. (Although I accept what tptacek says here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641483 )

moron4hire 13y ago
the problem is, as far as anyone with the power to do anything about it is concerned, what the NSA did was completely legal. They also claim the power to not explain to us why it's legal. Or to explain the rules by which they decide what is legal. But the end result is the same: they have effectively proven that voting is a waste of time.