I would find it really interesting if some employees at companies like Google, Microsoft, etc would come forward and corroborate Snowden's claims as well. At some point, SOME engineering work was involved on their side to make it happen, and there is likely documentation. I would love to see design documentation on how the collection systems work so we can confirm exactly the government has automated access to.
In another thread some Google employees were saying that it's unlikely that Google has a secret backdoor system, since keeping products of any size online requires a lot of collaboration amongst the different teams, and the infrastructure changes so often anything that was at one point installed would be broken by now.
Yeah, my point is, we don't really know what the scope is -- we have Snowden's word and some slides that mention direct access to servers. But the engineers who worked at the companies and performed the integrations know and probably have evidence if it was just standing up a box they scp'd data to manually upon request, or a more elaborate automated system. If some of those people would step forward with evidence, we could could confirm or refute Snowden's claims.
But the minute some Google (or Facebook, etc) engineer mentions some slight detail about how that access works, you will have half the Internet trying to break it.
Although that would be kinda fun....
I've deployed a large Office 365 system. It has the capability built in to do ediscovery searches across any item in the system, and can do so without the knowledge of the end user. The organization I'm familiar with audits employee emails that meet certain criteria. Google has e same capability.
Providing a "back door" to those systems is a simple as defining a user role.
I'm not sure how large your "large" Office 365 system is, but I'd hazard a guess it's half a dozen orders of magnitude smaller in size and complexity than Google's systems.
Also, for criminal matters law enforcement has been able to obtain search history from Google with a search warrant. So they have the ability to search search history, which is a dataset several orders of magnitude larger in size & scope than GMail.
If you seriously believe that Google doesn't have the capability to perform discovery on the public facing GMail, that's fine, but the capabilities that Google has in production today suggest that your belief is not quite correct.
