Hey I'm as big of a hair-on-fire guy as the next guy, but this is getting too much.
A bit of context. Please.
The U.S. has always overreacted to existential threats. In fact, that's the way the system is designed. If it has to fail, it fails towards a dictatorial president and overbearing laws -- which are removed by a frequently-elected and truly representative Congress as soon as the threat is gone. We've been going along like this for 240 years or so. There is nothing new about the abuse of power or removal of freedoms (unfortunately).
So what's changed? First, internet companies are tracking every freaking thing you do online. They figured out that the average Joe will give up his privacy for free email, and they're having a field day with it.
Governments trump companies, and since the data is already collected, every government on the planet is wanting a piece of that action.
Second, there is no ever-changing Congress looking to score points with the folks back home. Instead, there's a static political system that fears looking bad -- and it's grown a perpetual fear machine built up around terror that can make it look really bad.
Folks do this issue a great disservice when they focus only on the U.S., or only on the NSA. Look guys, if the U.S. and the NSA disappeared tomorrow, you'd have the same problems you have now -- you just wouldn't know so much about them. This has nothing specifically to do with them. (I'm not making excuses, only pleading for context).
The tech community brought this on themselves. We are the people to blame. The trade-off of tracking data for free stuff was too good to be true. In fact, instead of the tracking data being almost worthless to the average citizen, as it turns out this data is much too valuable to give up under any circumstances, at least in the aggregate. Until that leaky bucket is fixed somehow, nothing changes.
There's a big difference between my agreement with a private company which allows me to use their webmail service in exchange for scraping my data for ad use and agents of the state watching everything I do with the expectation that this data will be used to harass, fine, detain, prosecute, or execute me or my family. The distinction here is that state entities are granted authority to do things no corporation can.
TL;DR - Google doesn't use this data to kill people or rig elections.
No, but once the instrumentation is in place to collect it, by Google or anybody else, it's fair game for various governments to use it to do just that.
What would the alternative be? To have Google et al be above the law?
You can't have it both ways. If you give up your data, you give up your data. You can't just give it up for special purposes. You don't get to choose. (And neither does Google or whoever is on the other end of the transaction)
You could even take all government influence out of it and still have problems. Companies could just buy up each other, pay for illegal data transfers, and so on. That's kinda the point here. A tiny little piece of data like my email to Aunt Claire this morning is almost completely worthless. Almost. But zillions of pieces, accumulating day-by-day? The value, in both monetary and intelligence terms, just keeps going up. Every day the economics of getting that data, by hook or crook, changes in favor of it being lost. And once it's lost, in most cases it's lost forever. There's no "going back" to having the data private again. That's an unsustainable system.
The spying goes far beyond webmail. Most people haven't agreed to have their phone calls tapped, or backdoors put into networking hardware and encryption standards.
My comment wasn't specifically about Google or webmail. That was simply an example. It's the principle of trading private information to another service in return for something that doesn't scale. Whether it's software, network infrastructure, web apps, etc -- the specific type of trade or vendor involved is not the point.
A bit of context. Please.
The U.S. has always overreacted to existential threats. In fact, that's the way the system is designed. If it has to fail, it fails towards a dictatorial president and overbearing laws -- which are removed by a frequently-elected and truly representative Congress as soon as the threat is gone. We've been going along like this for 240 years or so. There is nothing new about the abuse of power or removal of freedoms (unfortunately).
So what's changed? First, internet companies are tracking every freaking thing you do online. They figured out that the average Joe will give up his privacy for free email, and they're having a field day with it.
Governments trump companies, and since the data is already collected, every government on the planet is wanting a piece of that action.
Second, there is no ever-changing Congress looking to score points with the folks back home. Instead, there's a static political system that fears looking bad -- and it's grown a perpetual fear machine built up around terror that can make it look really bad.
Folks do this issue a great disservice when they focus only on the U.S., or only on the NSA. Look guys, if the U.S. and the NSA disappeared tomorrow, you'd have the same problems you have now -- you just wouldn't know so much about them. This has nothing specifically to do with them. (I'm not making excuses, only pleading for context).
The tech community brought this on themselves. We are the people to blame. The trade-off of tracking data for free stuff was too good to be true. In fact, instead of the tracking data being almost worthless to the average citizen, as it turns out this data is much too valuable to give up under any circumstances, at least in the aggregate. Until that leaky bucket is fixed somehow, nothing changes.