Google Admits Handing over European User Data to US Intelligence Agencies

[Doktor Howl]

Is anyone here even remotely surprised that the government would ask and that Google would comply?

[LMNO]

Not really.

[Triple Zero]

No, but not being surprised doesn't mean it shouldn't be exposed or gotten angry about.

Also if you're rubberhosed you're probably fucked whether you give them the data or not. Just possibly slightly less unpleasantly tediously fucked if you do.

[LMNO]

I wonder how this will affect people signing up for G+.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I'm still finding it hard to blame Google for this. As a company CEO, faced with the choice of complying with a hysterical draconian government or explaining to their shareholders why profits are down to almost fuck all and telling their american workforce "hey guys sorry but you're out of a job cos we wanted to make a hollow gesture of resistance, knowing full well that it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference in the long run.

But, yeah, blame a friggin software company for the actions of the fourth reich. I'm pretty sure the Europeans will do the same thing, given that - who the fuck is going to call the real criminals on their bullshit?

[Triple Zero]

Does that mean I also don't get to blame Nokia-Siemens for developing the Deep Packet Inspection technology for the Iranian Internet filter?

Sure, it doesn't take any blame off the Iranian government, but that doesn't mean some fuckheads at the Nokia-Siemens joint venture didn't damn well know what they were building and who they were building it for.

Similar goes for Google, no it doesn't take blame from the USA doing it or the EU not going after it (just watch), it sure makes them complicit, they had to choose breaking the law in one continent or the other.

[PopeTom]

As a US citizen my perspective had always been that if any government representative (federal, state, or local) comes along and asks you if you will hand something over to them your answer should be the same as their answer to 'Do you have a warrant?'

[Jenne]

It's tricky territory--there's so much more to take away from folks when it comes to privacy...you delve into the minutiae of any "right to privacy," world over, and you'll find *more of an illusion* than anything else or anything concrete. Until incidences line these are brought to light, the illusion holds ground, and you might try believe you have dominion over your own stuff. But unless you work tinfoil-hat hard at it, uh, nah, you don't. You're jet conditioned to not see the restraints and so very used to the constraints. It takes the cloth being whisked away for the machine behind the curtain to be revealed.

Just as the twin tower crash ten years ago revealed a vulnerability that always existed as well as an lack of impregnability we still live with today--I believe we are as safe now as we were then. Unfortunately, thanks to the Patriot Acts, we are certainly less free.

[Pæs]

I'm considering checking out BigString, too.
They're US-based, but allow you to delete/edit emails after hitting send, as well as limiting the number of times an email can be read before it self-destructs.

They seem to be claiming that there's no trace of the email after you delete it, except for a placeholder to let you and the sender know that an email was sent. If they really have no other record of the email after you delete it, there's nothing to hand over when the gubbamints ask.

BigString emails can be destroyed, recalled or changed even after they've been opened!

[Triple Zero]

If you find a good EU based alternative, let me know.  I am utterly unsurprised that this is the case, I have to say.

Heyy you can also give your search queries to Russia

http://www.yandex.com

I just tried Yandex, Russia's main search engine (or so it claims). I have to say, I kind of like it. It gives results reasonably fast (Duck Duck Go can load a bit slow sometimes in my experience), and it gives good and relevant results.

The capabilities of its search operators are kind of basic, but in return for that you get back the "oldskool" Google behaviour: just search for the fucking keywords please, it doesn't try to be "smart" and come up with all sorts of variations of webpages you might also like that don't quite exactly match your query.
I mean, we're all smart enough to dig through the webs using a traditional "contains keyword A and keyword B" search engine, coming up with additional queries to refine our searches by ourselves, whereas when a search engine tries to be smart and "helpful" it often just serves to thwart and dilute the intended precision of your keyword arrows.

(ok this is not entirely true it does have auto correct features, but it does actually listen if you add a + in front of the keywords, as opposed to Google, who still tries to be smart about it)

And it seems friendly, look at the cute drawings on their explanation page about image searching: http://company.yandex.com/technologies/duplicate_images.xml

[Cain]

In post-Soviet Russia, government collects information to give to you?

[Triple Zero]

In post-Soviet Russia, government collects information to give to you?

I'm not sure if they're government though. Doesn't seem to be. They also have an additional (probably financial) HQ in the Hague, NL.

Certainly there's no reason to assume they can't be coerced to give up their usage data to the Russian gov, maybe you can tell me whether that's less, more, or equally worrying as the US gov having my data?

The main reason I posted the link was my surprise at how high-quality this search engine is, in addition to its minimalism/simplicity. Most other non-US search engines are a bit of a pain to use. I could almost see myself using this instead of Google.

Another factor is that most big search engines' indexes don't completely overlap, they do mostly on the really popular stuff, but obscure things might be skipped by Google appear in Yandex, Yahoo or Bing.

Oh and if you look in the advanced search screen you'll find it has a filter for just PDF results--Google has this too, just tack filetype:pdf at the end of your query--but somehow I suspect that a Russian search engine might index a lot of ebooks that Google possibly avoids due to copyright and/or pimping its own Google Books service.