[disintermediate]

These companies go to great lengths to avoid US tax jurisdiction, employing an army of accountants and lawyers to avoid giving money to the IRS. Perhaps they could work with the same dedication to avoid giving their users data to the NSA.

[declan]

That is true, but numbers matter. There's a big difference between the NSA serving 10 FAA702/FISA orders a year on Microsoft for Skype intercepts vs. 10 million. It's targeted vs. wholesale surveillance. We know from companies' disclosures the upper bound is on the order of thousands, and is likely to be far less.

Put another way, there are some actual terrorists/spies/etc. out there, even if the number of terrorists is far lower than the government would like you to believe. If the NSA serves Microsoft with, say, 10 or 100 lawful orders a year to eavesdrop on those communications, is that something worthy of working with "dedication" to prevent? Probably not.

What the companies should be doing is encrypting what they can to frustrate wholesale surveillance. Which Microsoft isn't doing. Which I wrote about here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/

And here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591179-38/

[oceanstone]

When Verizon was served with a FISA request for all their customer's meta data, each day for 3 months, that counted as one order.

That means Verizon might have "only" received 4 FISA orders a year.

[declan]

No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening. Facebook has said, for instance, it has received a total of requests covering 18,000 accounts over a 6-month period, which includes NSA requests and local cops trying to find a missing person: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589461-38/facebook-micro...

The Facebook etc. statements were designed to address precisely the concern you raised. Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, have remained very, very quiet. For good reason: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591391-38/surveillance-p...

[coldtea]

>No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening.

Ah, it's ok then.

[declan]

If you have evidence they're lying, I'd be delighted to hear it. Otherwise I'll believe them over a random HN comment, thanksverymuch.

[grey-area]

While I agree with you that numbers matter, having the infrastructure in place and a secret court system which simply passes almost every request allows this to be used as much as the NSA decides is reasonable, and for that use to increase exponentially over time. That in itself is dangerous, because we have no idea what future administrations would use the data for.

A manual process would ensure that the number of requests is kept reasonable.

[adventured]

Such very different issues.

Tax structures are intentionally written to leave openings (like the double irish), courtesy of lobbyists. And it doesn't take much effort to do it. For every politician that wants to bust Google for dodging taxes, there's one that wants to give them huge tax breaks for putting a data center in their state, and so on.

When it comes to jurisdiction, the US Government has essentially no power, via the tax code or otherwise, to force Google to pay taxes on foreign profits unless the money is repatriated.

The same is not true about national security. Political alignment is almost entirely on the side of giving the government more power for 'security' purposes.

When it comes to national security laws, and having your corporation located in the US, you can forget about fighting back and winning. The laws are in place, and they can not be rolled back without a fundamental culture / attitude shift among Americans. It's arguable, in my opinion, that it's dangerous to fight the government on these issues (eg Joe Nacchio / Qwest). That's not to say someone shouldn't do it, but when your personal well being may be at risk, very few executives are likely to put their comfortable living on the line.

Lobbying about taxes? Half the government is likely to be on your side when you do. Nobody really cares if you do that by comparison to national security issues.