Silicon Valley firms are either not responding to questions about allowing government surveillance on servers or are issuing bland non-denial denials.
Apple and Facebook say they don’t provide the government provide direct access to their servers, while not defining what “direct access” is and then saying they will comply with court orders. Google essentially said the same thing, that they have no “back door.” Their statements are utterly unconvincing. So, if you haven’t already figured this out, anything you post online, can and is being intercepted, read, and stored by the government – with a nod and a wink from for allegedly “Do Not Evil” Silicon Valley.
From Doug Henwood on Facebook:
Privacy? Ha! A college classmate of mine who spent some time in the CIA just informed our class list: “All that we enter and access on the internet is recorded and stored at an NSA site for later review (including this listserv).”
The data could go anywhere, which is troublesome. False positives will happen too. They will be able to track considerable amounts of information about us and of course it will be used against political opponents.
Putting that much data into a coherent form where is can be queried is a huge task to be sure – and is something Google and Facebook do every day. Surely the government can do it too. A bill collector client told me, once we have their social, that’s the magic key that unlocks everything. This much data is many magic keys.