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Oh come on. Google is willing and able to push back on overly broad governmental requests. When the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 companies in 2005 asking for months of user queries, Google was the only company I know of that fought back in court and won. I know because I wrote a declaration for that case. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/doj-sent-subpoenas-to-34-compa...; and http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-responds-to-doj-subpoen...; for example.

We were also the first company to publish our transparency report on governmental requests, and the first company to include any specific number ranges on the number of national security letter (NSLs) that we get.

See also http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/google-fights-nsl&#...; about national security letters. The appropriate and constructive place to channel frustation is at bad laws/legal provisions.




Matt, I know you really love Google but you need to do a bit more research:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-...


I'm sorry but that article talks about how Google and NSA worked together when the accounts of Chinese activist were being hacked.

How is that related to helping the US government spy on its citizens?


Cutts said:

> push back on overly broad governmental requests

> publish our transparency report on governmental requests

and also mentioned Google 'fighting back' at National Security Letters.

The fact that courts have upheld secrecy between NSA and Google before (just the one we know about) is quite relevant.

There are bad things at play here and just because Google has a cute, colorful logo and hires nerds doesn't make them innocent either.


like, say, into the actual source of that story[1] instead of the wired blog writeup? For instance, the part that explicitly talks about limiting the share of information to the Chinese intrusion and not user data?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870404150457504...


Equating the allegations denied in this post to the response to an attack by a nation state against Google is kind of like comparing reporting a robbery to the police to criminally conspiring with them.


Google just recently got out from under anti-trust scrutiny. It would be trivial for the Feds to bust Google's chops using that at any time. They've got Google's number any day of the week now. Step out of line, suddenly a new anti-trust inquiry begins.




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