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by mden 1480 days ago
You're making a wildly different claim than the initial one. The initial claim is "obviously Gmail and such are piped directly into global intelligence databases". Portals for law enforcement which likely require some kind of warrant and very likely have regular audits are not slightly the same thing as directly piping the data to the intelligence community. As for "their inter-datacenter communications were being piped directly", that was revealed by Snowden and you correctly used the past tense "were". Is there evidence that either Alphabet or Meta are giving direct access to their users' data beyond what the law requires?

(Disclaimer, employee of Google, my opinions are my own and all that. I have no info beyond what is public knowledge.)
3 comments
bhk 1480 days ago
> Portals for law enforcement which likely require some kind of warrant

It was recently reported that major tech companies (including Google) release user data without warrants, and without even authenticating the party requesting the data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30842757

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mden 1480 days ago
That's an interesting article, thanks for the link. It doesn't support the original claim very strongly however. It showcases there's a flawed process for obtaining user data (which is still obviously bad) but it's far removed from Microsoft, Google, or Fb directly piping their data over to the NSA.
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doliveira 1480 days ago
Lots of "likely" and "were" in your comment...

I'll be honest, this is really the first time I've seen a tech circle in which this whole surveillance apparatus is not a common established knowledge.

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mden 1480 days ago
To be clear I'm not saying there isn't an extensive surveillance apparatus. I'm saying the claim that giant tech companies are willfully providing unrestricted access to user data to the intelligence community is not at all an "obvious" one as claimed and requires evidence. Do you disagree with that?
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charles_kaw 1479 days ago
> "obviously Gmail and such are piped directly into global intelligence databases"

well, they were. without google's consent :) past tense, obviously

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