[gruez]

>the agency does not have direct access

Sure, NSA can't directly query against whatever database gmail uses to store your email, but they still have all your emails, photos, and login history. As far as your privacy is concerned, there isn't really any meaningful difference.

[JoeSmithson]

Do you mind explaining precisely what you mean by "NSA has all my emails"?

Suppose I sent an email yesterday from my Gmail to a friend's Gmail, are you saying the text of this email is stored on an NSA machine?

[gruez]

>Suppose I sent an email yesterday from my Gmail to a friend's Gmail, are you saying the text of this email is stored on an NSA machine?

Maybe not today, but during its heyday must certainly.

>Internal NSA presentation slides included in the various media disclosures show that the NSA could unilaterally access data and perform "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details.[2] Snowden summarized that "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."

>[Glenn Greenwald] added that the NSA databank, with its years of collected communications, allows analysts to search that database and listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."[44] Greenwald was referring in the context of the foregoing quotes to the NSA program X-Keyscore.[45]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#E...

But let's suppose they don't have your emails stored in their datacenters. Instead, it's still stored on google's servers but they can access your emails via automated requests to google, via search terms or by providing your user handle. Is that a meaningful difference, in terms of privacy?

[JoeSmithson]

So essentially, no, they do not have "all my emails".

> "Instead, it's still stored on google's servers but they can access your emails via automated requests to google, via search terms or by providing your user handle"

You just said previously the exact opposite! That they can't query Google, but they have the data themselves.

> "Is that a meaningful difference, in terms of privacy?"

Yes, because it means Google are aware of what data they are being requested, and what they are sending in return.

The transparency reports for these companies show that the total number of requests is in the region of 10k/year - a lot in some senses, but nowhere near the level of surveillance many people seem to believe.

[lawnchair_larry]

No, they in fact cannot query my emails via automated requests to Google. I actually do know how that process works, and there is a human involved, so please stop making things up.

We can discuss the problems with it, but only if we start from a point of truth.

[throwawayway9]

Even with a human involved, the process can be subverted by the human basically approving all requests.