The time to file a lawsuit was years ago when the programs started. Google and Microsoft are now in the same category of privatized government "partners" as Halliburton and Lockheed.
This goes beyond simple diffusion of responsibility, leaders at Google and Microsoft were complicit in the crimes the NSA committed and did nothing to stop them.
IBM was able to eventually live down its involvement in the holocaust. In today's world there is no excuse for a modern tech company led by wealthy, enlightened people to commit these kinds of wrongs. Ironically, it's as if Google's mantra became "Be Evil".
Such doings (empowering the NSA, IRS, etc. to snoop on innocent people for the express purpose of entrapping them or contriving other evidence) are pretty much the definition of exactly the kind of insidious evil that one would hope to be able to trust its service providers not to engage in.
My prediction is that within a few months as viable open source alternatives for Google and Microsoft services become available, we'll see lots of people leaving their cloud platforms/services.
What makes you think the majority of Google employees had any idea this was going on? We have the testimony of several Google employees who comment here on Hacker News that there was no indication any of this was happening.
Then there's the news report that corroborates this, implying not even the leaders of the companies had any idea.
I mean, again, they could all be lying...but Occam's Razor and all that.
Maybe the world is a bit more random than one in which overarching conspiracies rule everything. Snowden was pretty random, no? He could have stayed put and sold his data, or simply kept his mouth shut, but he did what he did when he did it. There are a lot of other people working there, and none of them were the ones to expose all of that crap. So maybe the people at Google valued their jobs more than doing the right thing. That hardly makes for some big plot.
Your statement only makes sense if you make the logical leap that Google does the things you are implying they do. The fact that none of Google's 100k+ employees and former employees have ever leaked anything of this nature is a strong indicator that it's not actually happening.
This goes beyond simple diffusion of responsibility, leaders at Google and Microsoft were complicit in the crimes the NSA committed and did nothing to stop them.
IBM was able to eventually live down its involvement in the holocaust. In today's world there is no excuse for a modern tech company led by wealthy, enlightened people to commit these kinds of wrongs. Ironically, it's as if Google's mantra became "Be Evil".
Such doings (empowering the NSA, IRS, etc. to snoop on innocent people for the express purpose of entrapping them or contriving other evidence) are pretty much the definition of exactly the kind of insidious evil that one would hope to be able to trust its service providers not to engage in.
My prediction is that within a few months as viable open source alternatives for Google and Microsoft services become available, we'll see lots of people leaving their cloud platforms/services.