[viraptor]

Many strawmen, but nothing relating to my comment, which was "do we know Google knew about the taps". I'm not aware of any article proving that was the case.

Re. the first link - companies of the size of Google will meet with the NSA at some point. They have to comply with many regulations and will have private chats at high level. They even willingly run NSA's software (selinux). This doesn't prove or disprove cooperation in communication taping.

Just one of your points I wanted to address.

> Google never really deletes anything from gmail and other services (disk is cheap)

Also, data invalidation is hard - probably every company that's big enough should have it in their ToC, unless they assign a full drive to each customer and do hardware wipe on it when something is deleted. Deleting a file is essentially just setting a "this is deleted" flag, until other data overwrites this. I'm willing to bet none of the companies you interact with guarantees your data is physically deleted. Everyone should be aware of that.