People in Russia felt much safer using iCloud, Gmail or Google Drive. Of course they comply to some requests by Kremlin or police. But Yandex or VK just give information straight away often times without much procedure.
You misunderstand. The NSA went out of their way to tap Google's lines outside of the US, which made the leadership at Google furious. It accelerated the work to encrypt international fiber (I think many people were really bothered by the tcpdump of a bigtable RPC containing a user ID). I was at a conference shortly after an saw a SVP rip an NSA rep to pieces.
If Google is doing anything that is required of them legally as a US corp, I don't have a problem with that.
That's what Google claims, however the leaked slides claimed "direct access".
edit: Does it really matter if they setup an FTP server instead of direct access, when we know a request can literally ask for "all" data (see Verizon).
> When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the US government — generally through secure FTP transfers and in person," Google spokesman Chris Gaither told Wired, among other news outlets. [1]
right, you're discussing the mechanism by which Google shares information with the US government- when required by law.
These systems don't give access to "all" data. Telephone companies are different- AT&T had a long standing, off the books agreement with US intelligence agencies (see Idea Factory for a fact-based discussion of what AT&T did) to share large amounts of information illegally.
We know that at least some companies were ordered to handover all data, continuously [1].
edit: I think we have enough evidence that I would assume that it's valid for the other companies on the slides, and if it's not true you'll have to provide some proof of that.
edit 2: [2]
> It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."
> Greenwald explained that while there are "legal constraints" on surveillance that require approval by the FISA court, these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision.
> "There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans," Greenwald said. "You can't target them without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents."
> "And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst," he added.
edit 3:
> Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” [3]
...has become such a huge tinfoil-hat kook that it taints anything he's ever said and done. I have no way of knowing when his brain-rot started to affect his writings, so I can't really trust the shit that seemed so convincing back in 2003 any more.
Weird how there is limited hard evidence of a secret, illegal government program... It's a lot more than I've seen than evidence for the claims of Yandex proactively sharing data with the Russian government.
> The difference is that checks and balances are much stronger in US,
You say that after we were talking about the NSA literally spying on US citizens, and without any proof? C'mon, are you really going to badger me about not having having the exact "hard evidence", and not even read my sources or provide ANY evidence yourself.
edit: Yes, it got challenged AFTER needing to be leaked by a whistleblower that still can't return to his home.
> Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act has no whistleblower protection. If the courts were allowed rule honestly and without political entanglements, there's no way the Espionage Act is constitutional at prima facia.
