

Google's chief legal officer: live Q&A - anon1385
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/jun/19/google-chief-legal-officer-david-drummond-live-q-and-a

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zacharypinter
Interesting how they're doing this Q&A in the same format and on the same site
as Snowden's Q&A the other day. That looks like a much smarter move than
putting up questions on some internal Q&A tool where people might suggest that
they have a motive to censor questions.

For everybody reading into the ambiguity of terms like "direct access", Google
seems to be trying really hard to remove any uncertainty about their position:

"There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door,
no drop box."

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anon1385
It think the 'direct access' issue is an irrelevant distraction for most of
the Guardian's readers since NSA don't need any kind of warrant to access the
data of non-US persons. For non-US users what is the meaningful difference
between 'direct access' and a system that just approves every NSA request?

I would ask: how many requests for data on non-US persons has Google denied?
They want to give the impression that they fight requests on behalf of their
users, but I have trouble imagining how that would actually work. In my mind
it goes more like this:

NSA> We need all the emails for the non-US user of account
jihadi_joe@gmail.com

Google> We can see that user has a non-US IP but what evidence do you have
against that user?

NSA> That is classified. Hand over the data.

Google> Okily-dokily.

