| I worked on these cases at EFF and I'm skeptical of the automatic "NSA has access to everything" intuition. What we learned from that era includes things like (1) spy agencies are incredibly aggressive and pursue tons of different angles to get access to things (2) spy agencies have a lot of money (3) spy agencies often have interpretations of law that would surprise the public or legal experts (and sometimes courts have issued sealed rulings permitting them to do things that surprise the public or legal experts later when they're unsealed) (4) some people throughout different parts of society assume culturally that companies in a country "should" generally help the spy agencies of that country's government because they are the "good guys" or "on the same team" or whatever These things are all pretty bad and scary, but they still don't imply absolutely infinite power or access, because all of them come with different kinds of pushback. People also just tell them no! I want to write an article with a colleague about the continuing role of culture here, because I think there are companies or industries where the default reaction is to want to cooperate with the government, and others where the default reaction is not that. There are certainly secret things that have never come out, e.g. whatever Senator Wyden keeps alluding to, and what kind of program or authority was behind the interception of hardware shipments to covertly tamper with them, and whether there is a bulk financial data interception program, and presumably lots of other stuff. I don't agree with these things, and I want them to be exposed and stopped, and I also don't think they constitute infinite power over all parts of the tech industry. |