It is likely you have even less of an idea of what you're talking about when it comes to Google's interactions with NSA than you do about how their motivations w/r/t SOPA.
I have, at length, in the past, and it's very disingenuous of you to pretend that you don't know that. Most people who accuse Google of being a tool of NSA have the excuse that they got the idea from the Guardian, which later retract^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontradicted itself out of the accusation. But you know that already. You accuse Google of being a tool of NSA because you want them to be, because you believe that by repeating a lie over and over again you can somehow crowbar reality into your weird little conspiracy theory, or at least get a bunch of people on HN on board with it.
You are partially right. All of my beliefs are provisional and I'm waiting to be proven wrong. I'd very much prefer to believe that Google acted properly (not necessarily legally) with respect to its cooperation with NSA. To date I am still not convinced.
How is it possible to feel comfortable with Google's answers when you consider that companies are forbidden from disclosing some information? I'm equally skeptical of the truthfulness of both Google's and the NSA's responses to the revelations.
I'm not able to accept the whole "trust us, everything was circuitously legal so there's nothing to worry about" excuse.
"How is it possible to feel comfortable with Google's answers when you consider that companies are forbidden from disclosing some information?"
Because you are implicitly claiming that not a single VP, SVP, well known person, etc, would be ethical enough to quit over this if Google had done it wrong.
Given who those people are, it seems far fetched.
I hope you're right. That is certainly what I thought before the Snowden revelations. To date I don't think Google has offered sufficient transparency into the process to adequately restore trust. If the NSA (via secret laws or dictums) is preventing this from happening, it is at the expense of Google's reputation.
Further, the recent revelations that the NSA deploys agents as employees of various tech companies (like Google) indicates that Google's internal security processes have been breached and the careful (and likely reasonable) way that cooperation with law enforcement has been crafted may be largely irrelevant.
The above may be wild speculation, and I hope it's incorrect. But considering the Snowden revelations I don't think Google has done enough to make a person or firm that explicitly didn't want the NSA to have access to data its feel comfortable using Google's network and services to store/transmit it.
And, since Google's core business is ads, Google has designed its own systems so that data from any Google service (analytics, dns, gmail, doubleclick) can be used for targeting and behavioral profiling. The scope of it is really quite impressive. Thus I think it's sobering to think about all the data being readily available to the NSA, as Snowden suggests it is.
