zlacker

The order was merely a nicety. I cannot imagine any company succeeding at taking a stand against the United States Federal Government on when it really wants something.

Likely the same with any other major nation state (I bet the chinese govt once showed Google it could at will access all their data, in order to capitulate cooperation, while the US is given full access at any time for any reason)

>>balls1+(OP)
I don't like Apple. I'm cheering on the current lawsuit brought by the feds. I do not, and never have owned, an iPhone, and Apple is not the bastion of privacy they sell themselves as.

That said, credit where it's due: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

>>balls1+(OP)
What are you basing this on? The US government gets told no about things it really wants literally all the time.

Edit: this is also not the federal government, state and local government has even less juice than the little the Feds possess.

>>balls1+(OP)
Eh, no. Are you familiar with MUSCULAR? It was in the Snowden leak. Basically Google kept telling the NSA to fuck off, so the NSA dug a hole and tapped some fiber to exfiltrate clear text communications between data centers, which was apparently a lot of important stuff back then. Within weeks of the MUSCULAR leaks, all Google datacenters were communicating with each other with proper SSL termination.

Are you familiar with Aurora? It was that time in 2009 when a Chinese military unit broke into Google and started poking around for information about some known dissidents. They were expunged quickly and the level at which Google stepped up their security game is unparalleled in the history of infosec.

Yes, the NSA or various law enforcement groups can get information from Google if it goes through the proper channels, and there's probably a handful of intelligence community insiders who hand data out of Google from time to time as well, even as part of various intelligence sharing agreements, but the idea that the NSA just has free access to whatever they want there is ridiculous.