Larry Page addresses PRISM

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

by raldi • 13 years ago

715 441 13 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

danbruc• 13 years ago

(At least) one party did not tell the truth - opinions?

danso5• 13 years ago

There's two middlemen layers in this game of telephone:

1. What the leaker communicated to news outlets 2. What the news outlets communicated to us

It seems likely that exact terms and technical capabilities have been misunderstood or misinterpreted. Already, there are common misconceptions arising from the public's interpretation of the news...for example, conflating the NSA's deal with Verizon to the PRISM program. And there's also the natural confusion that generally arises in any discussion of government surveillance programs...some people seem to be surprised that the NSA is spying on foreign communications, when that is pretty much NSA's raison d'etre.

I think we should take Page as a clear denial, that is, that he's not weaseling out on a technicality. That doesn't mean he couldn't be flat out lying, of course. I think it's also a believable that if Google were to participate in a program like PRISM, that Page would be one of the people in the know.

pkfrank• 13 years ago

I trust Google more than the U.S. Gov't.

Who's lying? Confused?

cdash2• 13 years ago

If you don't trust the government how can you trust google in a situation like this?

chrisacky• 13 years ago

I can't understand the repeated use of "direct access". It's the kind of language a lawyer would use to qualify a patent clause.

- We do not provide direct access to our servers.

- We do not provide direct access nor is there a backdoor.

- O, but we do still pipe all of your data to external NSA servers. </sarc>

Every company named (I'm not just picking on Google here) has come out with the same overarching statement. "We do not provide direct access". It just smells of being rehearsed, and carefully coordinated to select such language.

packetslave2• 13 years ago

Read the blog post. "Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period"

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

Which is still pretty flexible language. "Oh, it's not open-ended access, it's limited to the conditions in the authorization..."

The Verizon order was limited to 3 months, for example, which is hardly open-ended... except that it presumably got re-upped every three months.

DannyBee2• 13 years ago

They can't say "we don't provide access", because depending on the law, they are forced to.

They say "we do not provide direct access", because as explained, any access goes through proper legal channels.

I'm not sure what you'd call it?

Remember language matters, and these are actionable public communications.

defen4• 13 years ago

Sure, but the statement as worded does not rule out the possibility that a third party contractor (Palantir) has access, and feeds it to the government. So Google has the motive (some theoretical secret law they need to abide) and they haven't denied a potential means (third party mediation). That's enough for people to convict in this situation.

tomkarlo5• 13 years ago

I believe everyone's using the term "direct access" in contrast to the access the government is already known to have, which is via warrant or other "indirect" requests.

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

Same thing with the "we've never heard of PRISM" language a number of companies are using. Well, yeah - that code name probably stayed within the NSA.

unreal375• 13 years ago

I believe Google on this. The language is clear and non-weasel-y. Google does not hand over user data to the government unless specifically requested. There is no open-ended access.

But I also believe the government works with ISP's (all major ISPs) so that they can intercept traffic. Which would be a type of MITM attack allowing them to get data from all major web sites.

javert2• 13 years ago

I think it's completely weaselly. It leaves wide open the possibility that a 3rd party, like Palantir, has access to the data.

cheald5• 13 years ago

Unless you can MITM SSL, having ISP access isn't enough. Remember, Google's the company that discovered that Turktrust had issued rogue CA certificates through Chrome's cert pinning.

Dove4• 13 years ago

    Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the 
    broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that 
    appears to have required them to hand over millions of 
    users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn 
    that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google 
    is disclosing information about our users’ Internet 
    activity on such a scale is completely false.

I'm not sure how much more strongly you'd like that worded. It seems pretty complete to me.

mullingitover8• 13 years ago

It's exactly the kind of denial you'd expect them to issue if they were legally required to deny any involvement.

boi_v22• 13 years ago

Well, I guess he will have to find a proper way to prove it, because if you are satisfied with just a blog post maybe you should think again.

natrius• 13 years ago

The Verizon order explicitly applies to calls within America between American citizens, which is why it was so novel. PRISM, as described, only incidentally collects information about Americans. This statement does not preclude the direct access to user data that the PRISM reports describe.

riotingpscifis• 13 years ago

Consider the NSA having MITM capabilities before the data reaches google:

1) This is exactly what you would need to do, to consider it realtime

2) None of the denials cover this

bane• 13 years ago

Google doesn't have to actively disclose...the government just needs to know where to "listen" to get the same data that's moving around Google's data centers.

chebucto• 13 years ago

He did not say

"We only give data to the government in response legal requests about named individuals."

Nelson692• 13 years ago

What's become very clear is that there is a lot of careful parsing going on. Careful parsing of the constitution, careful parsing of various laws, very very careful interpretation of the words on the page.

Does Google give anyone, any company, any entity, anyone at all direct access to their data? They've specifically excluded NSA. Does NSA subcontract that to Booz Allen Hamilton? Google claims that no government has this access, what about one of the 1200+ Top Secret cleared contracting companies?

Can these companies officially comment on this stuff yet? Or are they violating court orders if they talk about it? I like Google, I really want to trust them and I think they've moved the needle in our industry in some very positive ways. Honestly though, I think they could make much much stronger statements about this stuff. I expect them to say stuff like this to keep up with appearances.

onecommentonly4• 13 years ago

Either way, if Google has troves of info of everything you do online, NSA will get it. One way or another, front door, back door, in-direct access and what not

rsingel• 13 years ago

There's 2 different things going on, under different legal authorities and Google is confusing them.

Verizon was given a Patriot Act order for business records, metadata; no names; no content, but all citizens or foreigner.

Google and other tech companies are said to have gotten orders under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. That allows the government to compel communications companies to furnish lots of metadata and CONTENT on NON-U.S. persons. This was Congress legalizing warrantless wiretapping ala AT&T, but limiting it by requiring it to be targeted at non U.S. persons.

Compliance is mandatory, under contempt of court and companies must provide facilities and help. They also get reimbursed.

So it's likely Google never got an order like Verizon did, they likely got one that involves content, but is supposed to exclude intentional targeting of Americans.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

What about the date where "PRISM collection began" for Google, given as 1/14/09? What is that about?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...;

adventured11• 13 years ago

Prism has been admitted by the government to exist.

The notion that it exists, and Google isn't involved in it, is pretty absurd. That'd be like talking about tapping the telecom companies, but leaving out Verizon and AT&T.

See:

"The top intelligence official in the United States condemned as “reprehensible” leaks revealing a secret program to collect information from leading Internet companies and said a separate disclosure about an effort to sweep up records of telephone calls threatens “irreversible harm” to the nation’s national security."

Mr. Clapper said in a statement that the classified program to collect information from Internet providers is used to “protect our nation from a wide variety of threats” and he condemned the leaks of documents describing its existence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/intelligence-chief-call...

jessaustin2• 13 years ago

There is another explanation:

https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html

btilly• 13 years ago

That explanation is far easier for me to believe than the theory that Google would have agreed to cooperate in this spying effort.

This link has been submitted to the new queue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5841505 and I hope it gets voted up for wider attention.

defen4• 13 years ago

I guess the question then, is: how big of a cabal of "rogue" employees would it take to put evil code into production at a place like Google. I seriously doubt one person could do it, no matter how highly placed.

brown9-2• 13 years ago

This is incredibly far fetched. None of the audit controls at these companies notice that these employees are constantly accessing user's private data? And these double-agent employees manage to do all this secret work while still maintaining a cover as a regular employee who does well enough of a job to get good perf reviews and stick around?

danso5• 13 years ago

OK, in an alternate reality, what would a clear, flat-out denial look like? I mean, how could we tell such a thing differently than what was in the OP?

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday...Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records.

mullingitover8• 13 years ago

"We would never do this, not because the government hasn't asked us to, but because it's morally abhorrent. It goes against everything we personally believe in and stand for. Even if we were legally required to cooperate, we would resist and suffer incarceration if necessary. We believe in freedom more strongly than we fear the consequences of not cooperating with an oppressive government."

That kind of thing.

bradleyjg2• 13 years ago

Instead of enumerating what they don't do, which leads one to wonder what's left out, they could exhaustively enumerate the ways that they do cooperate. To a certain extent that's what they do with the transparency report. But I saw no strong claim that the report was complete, on the contrary the "whenever possible" language outright suggests the report is incomplete.

I'm sympathetic to being caught between a rock and a hard place, but given that this program only seems to involve US based companies, I would suggest that where ever possible people should prefer non-US software and services. Just as one prefers non-Chinese hardware for the exact same reason.

jjh42• 13 years ago

It's a good start for a response, especially since it has the CEO's imprimatur on it.

However with all the shady definitions the NSA is using (e.g I can imagine some weasel claiming user data is only the content not the metadata) I would have liked an explicit example.

Something like, "For example, when one gmail user emails another gmail user the government is not, for the majority of users who are not the subject of a specific government order, made aware of this in any way including the contents of the email, metadata and even that an email was sent. Obviously, we have no control over emails, sent outside our network."

washedup3• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more. The key terms used are subject to interpretation. Still not feeling comfortable about this.

tomkarlo5• 13 years ago

Is there any statement that would actually make you feel comfortable? If you're going to choose to disbelieve someone's statements, there's very little they can say to change that.

jlmorton• 13 years ago

They're using the phrase "direct access" because that phrase appeared in the leaked NSA slides.

dragonwriter5• 13 years ago

I can't understand the repeated use of "direct access".

From the rest of your comment, I think that you understand it quite well.

danielhughes• 13 years ago

I interpreted the repeated use of "direct access" as a response to the media reports yesterday that used that same phrase. My memory could be mistaken but I seem to recall hearing reporters use that phrase over and over. So it would stand to reason that Google and other companies would use the same phrase in their press releases. That would be a simple explanation of the consistent language. That said, I wish Congress would appoint a special prosecutor so that we can get to the bottom of all this.

saraid216• 13 years ago

It just smells of being rehearsed, and carefully coordinated to select such language.

Next time, hopefully they'll make it less clear so that you have to translate the company-specific jargon and feel better that it's spontaneous and careless. </sarcasm>

rasterizer2• 13 years ago

I'm not quite sure how you came to that conclusion, to me it reads like the opposite of slick lawyer talk, it's pretty unambiguous:

"No direct access", "No backdoors".

"Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period".

rwhitman• 13 years ago

The key word here is "direct". Based on the other thread speculating about Palantir its pretty likely there is a 3rd party contractor who does have direct access, and provides convenient plausible deniability to both parties

andreyf3• 13 years ago

Are you alleging they are trying to avoid making untrue statements in this blog post? Then what about "Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users' data are false, period."?

The first sentence of the WPo article which started this is "The NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies". I think saying "we do not provide direct access" is a reasonable response.

throwaway420• 13 years ago

The most interesting thing about Google's repeated use of the phrase 'direct access' is that there are so many nerds that don't comprehend how much wiggle room that phrase implies.

My bet is that Google is under order of some kind of National Security Letter and has to deny involvement here.

declan10• 13 years ago

AT&T didn't deny involvement during EFF's NSA wiretapping lawsuit. They didn't confirm or deny.

downandout2• 13 years ago

Unfortunately for Google, the Director of National Intelligence himself has confirmed the program and publicly called its disclosure "reprehensible". However, Google and the rest of these companies are in an awkward position. This program is still technically Top Secret, even though everyone now knows about it. Because of the obligation to secrecy that comes with having received classified information through the proper channels, they are essentially the only people in the world that are required by law not to acknowledge the existence of the program.

That said, the canned "direct access" line - the exact terminology curiously arrived at by no less than 5 separate corporate PR departments within hours of each other - is a poor facade. They should have considered how using identical terminology would make these denials so transparent.

declan10• 13 years ago

That is untrue. See:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588279-38/google-ceo-on-...; James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, released a statement last night saying the Guardian and Post articles about PRISM "contain numerous inaccuracies." Clapper's statement didn't confirm or deny any NSA activity. He said only that the articles "refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," and that any such collection is legal.

AJ007• 13 years ago

First, we have heard no denials from government officials that these programs exist. Indeed, US Senators & Obama have acknowledged they exist. Second, we have no denials of the document's authenticity.

Third, we would assume through logical deduction that someone who does deny the program's existence is either lying, being misleading, or has been mislead themselves.

Finally, if this program does not actually exist, what the hell program are Obama and these Senators' referring to?

aiiane8• 13 years ago

Program existing != program being exactly as described by the media.

The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies.

http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-pre...

camus2• 13 years ago

they are required, by the law, to deny any involvment with the NSA anyway or they can go straight in jail.

jjtheblunt• 13 years ago

Citation of such law?

w3pm• 13 years ago

Does it matter? What are the odds these guys are telling the truth when the President himself has lied about it? Maybe it's a concern of national security?

redwood• 13 years ago

The point is, they don't need to provide anything direct... the problem is the gov monitors the pipes and sees all, period. The problem is at the telcos, fundamentally. Even then it's not the telco's fault since they were forced and given immunity. The problem is our elected government, plain and simple. We've known about this since 2007. Happy to see it finally discussed in the mainstream.

greyman3• 13 years ago

I agree, the wording "direct access" is indeed very suspicious, and I tend to believe Arrington might be into something: http://uncrunched.com/2013/06/06/triangulating-on-truth-the-...;

I re-read the Larry's response carefully, and he did NOT refute the claim, that they are giving data to some 3rd party (who then forwards it to the government). He just says that government do not have direct access to it. But the issue that someone else can have the access is avoided, and it is exactly the same as the Zuck's response.

lifeguard5• 13 years ago

Totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent. What could go wrong?

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/14030/large/Occ...

ig1• 13 years ago

The term direct access was first used by the Guardian in their original story: "but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers." - most of the early denials (where the companies presumably hadn't read the article) didn't include the phrase but the later ones did.

So it's reasonable to suppose that the article was the source of that phrase.

aiiane8• 13 years ago

Yeah, this is really the most straightforward explanation.

voidlogic• 13 years ago

Possibly no direct access because the NSA has copies of Facebook, Google and Apple SSL private keys? Just sniffing the backbone...

zobzu• 13 years ago

Thats because they do give access through court orders, etc, ie "indirect access". Then again if they're "lying" then it means indirect access as in "they had to authenticate first!!"

myko• 13 years ago

The top couple of posts on Hacker News are about PRISM right now. On each post the first comment is about how similar the responses of each company are. It's almost as if there is a conspiracy to be conspiracy nuts on Hacker News.

SCAQTony• 13 years ago

Voted up for an astute observation

chrisbuc• 13 years ago

"Direct access" is a phrase from the original report in The Guardian: "The National Security Agency had obtained direct access..." - first sentence of the report.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa...

rosser2• 13 years ago

There's that "direct access to our servers" verbiage again. I love how these people apparently think that denying doing something that's not the thing that everyone is talking about is going to distract and mollify the public...

tsunamifury4• 13 years ago

When I worked IT for a medium sized university we were asked by the DOJ to install switches that copied all internet traffic directly to an unspecified government server. We were told all ISPs (anyone providing internet to more than 100 persons) were told to do this as well.

We refused to comply obviously as the request was absurd, but in the small print of the request we were told we were not allowed to speak of the request and were to deny any involvement if asked under some unknown penalty.

I wouldn't be surprised if special terms of Google's interaction with any government agencies has a similar clause.

thrownaway24245• 13 years ago

Please throw out an estimate of how big you think a mirror of all Google's network traffic might be.

adamdavis2• 13 years ago

And this is relevant to what?

rosser2• 13 years ago

The NSA's Utah data center was designed to host more storage than existed on the entire planet at the time. Sheer volume of data is among the least of their concerns.

ImprovedSilence• 13 years ago

the social "who's talking to who, and what sites did they visit" information... oh, probably this big -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

_stephan• 13 years ago

They don't need to access to all network traffic, just the interesting bits, like e.g. the internal traffic for the storage/backup systems used for GMail or Google Accounts .

jonknee3• 13 years ago

Big. But the NSA has been sucking in ridiculous amounts of data for many many years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

bluedino• 13 years ago

Why would they bother asking you, when they could simply ask your ISP? Why ask each customer?

jessaustin2• 13 years ago

Presumably university IT would have been able to provide more precise demographically identifying data than the ISP. It's unlikely the ISP was running the RADIUS server.

tsunamifury4• 13 years ago

The program and requirements were somewhat surreal. The architecture of the plan seemed to make little to no sense.

They considered anyone who provided internet access to 100's of people a provider (mostly universities etc) and requested that they install the pre specified hardware at their own expense (purchase, installation and maintenance).

They may have been concerned specifically with universities due to their foreign students and access to certain backbone lines that normal ISP's dont always have (WWW2?).

I spoke with the EFF and I was told I wasn't alone, but most people were rejecting the 'request' and not suffering any consequences. Our IT director took a hard line on the topic and tried to speak openly to reporters about how much the request offended him. He got as far as the school newspaper as in 2005 most people didn't understand the ramifications of this activity.

adrr• 13 years ago

You're not allowed to talk about NSLs, i recommend you change your post. Whats really bad about NSLs is they last forever, even a decade after receiving one you still can't talk about it without risking prosecution. NSLs issued in 2002 have no bearings on any active case yet we can't talk about them publicly. This makes it really hard to have a public debate on their usage.

tsunamifury4• 13 years ago

Was not an NSL as that would be turning over data on a specific individual.

This was a request to install hardware to collect all data at any time.

snowwrestler4• 13 years ago

And yet here you are talking about it.

(My point with this comment is to point out a contradiction--you can't prove that silence clauses work by talking about a real example of one.)

chime6• 13 years ago

If this entire PRISM thing is fabrication, then it is the best thing to have happened to personal liberties and Internet privacy since encryption. Until the recent shooting in CA, all the major networks were going on and on about PRISM. No amount of money could have bought the kind of attention PRISM is getting.

andyl• 13 years ago

Larry Page: "the U.S. government does not have direct access"

Apple: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access"

Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access"

Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access"

Remarkably consistent - as if it was coordinated, or scripted by an attorney...

gridscomputing2• 13 years ago

It's not "direct" access, it's access through a one-way live xml feed

varjag• 13 years ago

It's for the government, gotta be CSV in EBCDIC.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Please ... it will be binary format. Even the government isn't so wasteful to transmit data as xml. And if it did you could easily find where the servers were located by the 5 nuclear power plants needed to power such parsing.

boi_v22• 13 years ago

+1 "direct access" is just a deceiving jargon that is being used by a bunch of corporate lawyers working in sync.

deelowe5• 13 years ago

Or as if they are addressing the media talking points from yesterday... It was all over the news. Every channel was saying "direct access" and then throwing names like "Google," "Apple," and "Iphone" around.

earth2marsh• 13 years ago

Letting out my inner conspiracy theorist for a moment, a prism can be used to split light. For example, think of a pentaprism mirror in many DSLR cameras.

Did the NSA choose "PRISM" because they are splitting the signal upstream of providers, thus giving private companies plausible deniability?

agentultra• 13 years ago

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

Which is what is in question, no? If being in accordance with the law means keeping secret the requests you do serve, even if broad, means you're still handing out the information. You just don't have to put it in your, "transparency report."

Can't really say any of this is even remotely surprising given what we, in the industry of software development, know about what kind of information can be gathered and how vast volumes of it can be processed and analyzed.

newobj• 13 years ago

Here's an idea. Instead of telling us what you DON'T do, tell us what you DO do.

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

They're legally barred from doing so.

hga2• 13 years ago

Aren't these the same words we've been hearing from the others, ones that ignore the concept of a front door, push mechanism to satisfy government demands that cannot be revealed without committing a felony?*

I'd be a bit happier if we were to hear from Soviet refugee Sergey Brin....

* That's one of the terrible things about doing everything in secret; we know that if Google is subject to a broad demand from a National Security Letter they can't tell us that without suffering terrible penalties. The government has set up a situation where we literally are not able to trust the words of Google et. al.---at least prior to a major figure deciding to pay that penalty for the greater good. Which history tells us requires a rare courage.

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

The obvious issue here is that if the order was similar to Verizon's, Google wouldn't be allowed to admit its existence anyway.

esja• 13 years ago

Very carefully worded & not a denial of the allegations.

guelo4• 13 years ago

In his remarks today Obama said "Now, with respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States."

He's clearly stating that they do read non-American's emails. So how do they do it if they don't have access to Google's servers?

BTW, if you run a company outside of America you'd be crazy to rely on Google since the US could be reading your emails for corporate espionage purposes. I think in the long run these revelations are very threatening to Silicon Valley.

rryan• 13 years ago

So how do they do it if they don't have access to Google's servers?

So there's this protocol called SMTP...

dragonwriter5• 13 years ago

BTW, if you run a company outside of America you'd be crazy to rely on Google since the US could be reading your emails for corporate espionage purposes.

The US could be spying on activities, including email transmissions, that happen wholly outside of the US, as well.

The only reason PRISM, et al., are newsworthy is that there are expectations and widely-perceived legal/constitutional limitations of US government domestic surveillance that don't exist for foreign surveillance.

guelo4• 13 years ago

If my company is outside the US I can try to use infrastructure that at least makes it harder for the US to gain access. If, for example, the US is spying on European allies' infrastructure it would be a diplomatically damaging revelation and the European governments would try to fight it off. If I use a Silicon Valley service I know for a fact that the US can read my data at will without any recourse on my part.

It makes no sense to use Google which is why I'm saying this is threatening to Silicon Valley. Think of it this way, do you think a Chinese email service could become trusted enough to become globally competitive?

deelowe5• 13 years ago

Why is everyone so suspicious of Google to begin with? Is there a shred of evidence to lend any credibility to the accusations thus far? Given how Google's technology works, I imagine it would be quite an expense to provide the kind of access the govt. would want and Google hasn't been exactly overly enthused with having to comply with BS government requests(e.g. see how they deal with requests to scrub search results).

mullingitover8• 13 years ago

The President getting on national television and acknowledging that the program exists is a pretty big shred of evidence.

unreal375• 13 years ago

PRISM can exist, AND they cannot have direct access to Google data. Both can be true.

There is another vector of privacy leakage here - there are also the ISPs, who I am pretty sure work alongside the government in a majorly secretive way.

deelowe5• 13 years ago

He said nothing about Google, which is the topic of the OP.

chris_mahan4• 13 years ago

US government agencies have money available to them for this sort of things.

deelowe5• 13 years ago

OK. How does this automatically make Google and not, I don't know Chevrolet's onstar system, a target for criticism? Where's the evidence?

javert2• 13 years ago

Why is everyone so suspicious of Google to begin with?

We live in a semi-authoritarian society. Anyone the authorities might want to use for their purposes is suspect. We _should_ be encrypting everything as a matter of principle and not relying on one huge point of failure like Google.

monkmartinez• 13 years ago

Google doesn't know what the program is called inside the NSA, that is not earth shattering news. The problem is they don't need to "know" any of this. Hypothetically; If I was approached by the NSA for access to my users data... I would ask or come up with, at a minimum, some kind of Plausible Deniability... its the only sane option given the nature of these requests.

Ie. "Never heard of it... We push back as much as we can... See these push-backs in our transparency report. Feel Better?"

TheOsiris• 13 years ago

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law"

Well, now I feel better. Oh wait, PRISM is technically legal since it's supposedly authorized by the senate?

kjackson2012• 13 years ago

- What indirect access does Google provide to the government?

- What lawful data does Google automatically provide to the government without any requests?

- Can the government can ask Google for data once, and then Google is required to constantly supply data, periodically? If so, what is that data?

- What data does Google provide to the government upon request?

zaphar• 13 years ago

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/

danielpal• 13 years ago

What a lot of people haven't considered is that it's likely that the NSA had a big breakthrough on Integer Factorization and their capable of breaking RSA public key crypto (used everywhere you see HTTPS)

Then they can just save all your encrypted traffic and break it on demand.

We all need to start considering moving to Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

rthomas6• 13 years ago

Why is this at all likely?

chris_mahan4• 13 years ago

I think the US government can put enough pressure on any CEO of any company in the United States to lie about information collection efforts that such denial is meaningless.

kahirsch2• 13 years ago

I am going to guess that PRISM is a system which receives and parses the data files from those companies that are produced as a result of warrants/subpoenas/national security letters. So the excerpt from the NSA document that the Washington Post gave—"Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple" — may refer only to some kind of secure file transfer (private circuit with NSA hardware encryption, maybe).

It's just a guess, but it could fit with the relatively low cost figure given ($20 Million).

hammerzeit• 13 years ago

One thing I'd think about: If Google is lying or misrepresenting the truth here, then it would be phenomenally foolish to put out a denial under Larry's name as it just did.

Specifically, the personal integrity of the founders -- especially vis-a-vis these kinds of issues -- is one of the bedrocks of Google's culture. If a statement like this was proven out to be a deliberate misrepresentation (even if not an outright lie) it would cause IMO severe harm to Google morale.

necubi3• 13 years ago

For all those complaining about the language of this and other denials, what could possibly satisfy you? This seems as blanket as possible.

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process."

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale [as of the Verizon order] is completely false."

Finally, NSLs cannot compel an organization to lie like this, and doing so would be very legally dangerous for Google.

It's amazing how little critical thinking HN does when we see something that confirms our beliefs.

bitwize• 13 years ago

Larry Page wants to live. And he wants Google to keep functioning as a company, and not e.g., to have sudden tax issues crop up with the IRS. He has plenty of incentive to tell an out-and-out lie in this case.

Matt_Cutts10• 13 years ago

Oh come on. Google is willing and able to push back on overly broad governmental requests. When the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 companies in 2005 asking for months of user queries, Google was the only company I know of that fought back in court and won. I know because I wrote a declaration for that case. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/doj-sent-subpoenas-to-34-compa...; and http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-responds-to-doj-subpoen...; for example.

We were also the first company to publish our transparency report on governmental requests, and the first company to include any specific number ranges on the number of national security letter (NSLs) that we get.

See also http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/google-fights-nsl&#...; about national security letters. The appropriate and constructive place to channel frustation is at bad laws/legal provisions.

revelation2• 13 years ago

Huh? This is the direct result of the governments toxic conduct. They issue orders that forbid you from talking about having received any such order, they classify everything (to the point where a parallel society to the tune of 1M people exist that have access to (e.g.) cables, as became apparent during the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables row), they institute secret courts, laws with secret interpretations..

They have poisoned public discourse beyond repair, and you make it sound like a conspiracy theory.

necubi3• 13 years ago

At this point, it pretty much is a conspiracy theory. The only evidence we have of these companies' involvement is the leaked slides, which could have been the result of over-promising from a contractor or a misunderstanding from a non-technical manager. We have a lot of evidence to the contrary, particular that nearly every company allegedly involved has issued strong denials, which, again, they cannot be compelled to do by NSLs.

We can't conflate everything the government or the NSA does. This program seems unlikely for a number of reasons, including the conspiracy aspect (quite a lot of engineers working for Google, Apple, etc. would have to be in on it) and the technical challenges involved. Do you have any idea how much data Google produces? How complicated their infrastructure is?

themgt• 13 years ago

Obama confirmed in a press conference that PRISM exists, so concluding the program is imaginary would seem to require a fair lack of critical thinking.

andreyf3• 13 years ago

Could you quote/link to Obama's confirmation that Prism exists, and also the claim that it is imaginary?

waterphone• 13 years ago

Did he confirm PRISM exists, or the court order to Verizon? These are separate things. The Verizon story came first, followed by PRISM separately, less than a day later. Many people seem to be conflating the two.

d23• 13 years ago

Pedants gonna be pedantic.

akjetma• 13 years ago

In order to consider the possibility that this is clever language avoiding the truth of the issue, can someone explain how a system might work where google maintains plausible deniability while allowing access to the information it collects?

I have a naive understanding of how the internet works at the physical layer, but it seems like it would be trivial to create a system that allows for this statement to be true and for the data to actually be captured.

For an oversimplified, spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum example: if the user is the source in a passive optical network[1] and both the nsa and google are targets, google has not provided access to their data to the nsa, the user has.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network

edit: And what would a statement of denial that is inclusive of all possible arrangements sound like? I think that any statement that asserts a one-to-one correspondence between you and google would be unrealistic.

dannyr• 13 years ago

Some of the comments here just shows that people will believe what they want to believe.

There's nothing Google, Apple, Facebook, etc can say that some people won't poke holes into.

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

That's the frustrating state of the law. Gag orders make it very difficult to trust public communications like this. With secret, fairly unaccountable courts that statistically appear to rubber-stamp government requests, it's hard to discount the possibility of the NSA having, say, the authority to say "Google, you will post the following PR release now" as part of one of these orders.

chime6• 13 years ago

I don't want any more fluff "no direct access" emails. I just want these questions to be answered with a YES/NO:

1. Is there any way that someone outside of Google, can get a copy of an email I sent from my gmail to my own gmail, without a warrant that specifies my exact gmail address?

2. If I delete my Google search history, is there any way for anyone to access this history, with or without a warrant?

3. If I make a Google search from an incognito window, is there any way for Google to connect it to my Google account via my IP address? I know I've done this in the past to prevent spambots from creating fake accounts. Can Google connect these dots if someone sends them an NSL?

If the answer to any of this is YES, I am going to have to rethink my entire online life.

badclient• 13 years ago

You don't need google to answer some of these.

2. If I delete my Google search history, is there any way for anyone to access this history, with or without a warrant?

I would think google has historical backups they could refer to to pull out data that you've recently deleted.

Why not? You should already assume that google and pretty much any site logs your IP whether you are using incognito or not. You should also assume that any time you log in to gmail your IP is noted. It's extremely basic to do a db search for all gmail accounts that have been accessed by a given IP.

chime6• 13 years ago

I would think google has historical backups they could refer to to pull out data that you've recently deleted.

I should have clarified: except for temporary cache or periodic backups.

Why not? You should already assume that google and pretty much any site logs your IP whether you are using incognito or not. You should also assume that any time you log in to gmail your IP is noted. It's extremely basic to do a db search for all gmail accounts that have been accessed by a given IP.

I meant if you do not login to Google and do a search in incognito mode, is that history stored? I can delete my history if I'm logged in. But there is no way to delete history by IP. It seems 'safer' to in fact use your logged in Google account to search.

yuvadam• 13 years ago

Look at how governments these days are acting. Can you afford to assume that the answer to all these questions is NO?

muyuu2• 13 years ago

Get a VPN anonymously, pay in Bitcoin and never expect third party companies to adhere to any policy they can potentially break.

Anything else involves trust.

Achshar2• 13 years ago

That's not the point. The point is if we have to resort to such measures, we have already lost.

zmmmmm2• 13 years ago

You're asking very broad questions with only negative (ie: unprovable) answers. I don't think any company could ever say there is "no" way anybody can every get your search history after you delete it.They don't immediately run out and shred all the hard drives storing your data every time you delete something. Data would always be recoverable with some extreme amount of effort.

chime6• 13 years ago

What about Q1?

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

"We put that in our transparency report "whenever possible". :)

washedup3• 13 years ago

It is very possible that Google is lying or, at best, bending the truth.

glesica2• 13 years ago

I assume the government would require them to deny involvement, just like companies aren't (weren't?) allowed to discuss NSLs. Consequently, I view the denials as meaningless.

bskap• 13 years ago

So then what could these companies do to convince you, short of giving you physical access to all of their datacenters and shell access to all of their servers?

glesica2• 13 years ago

Nothing, that's the problem. What needs to happen is for these programs to be brought in to the sunlight and for Congress to make it explicitly legal for people to discuss them, regardless of any previous prohibition. Then I might be able to believe a denial, or at least accept it as meaningful.

bcRIPster• 13 years ago

IDK, if the gov't has core network switch access and is sniffing all of the packets, that's "back door" enough for my mind.

I'm wouldn't be surprised if none of these companies was involved, and it's just a case that the NSA is simply harvesting and processing all of their traffic for a net same result.

akilism• 13 years ago

yeah but what about Google's Irish branch?

uptown• 13 years ago

Watch this: http://youtu.be/oYNXVgYhPOc

The key phrase is "in the United States" so they just replicate the data outside the United States and you've got yourself a data 'black site' outside the jurisdiction of US law. No direct access. No laws broken. Open access to the NSA.

chris_mahan4• 13 years ago

Ireland?

hrbrtglm• 13 years ago

The dark side of the moon.

ISL• 13 years ago

Okay, HN, how can Google provide a compelling denial that they're not participating in PRISM as described in the leak?

If we're to be a country where innocence is presumed and guilt is proven, we must consider what Larry Page would write in the case that Google is not supplying any sort of un-warranted feed to NSA. Would it be any different?

rollo_tommasi• 13 years ago

General Clapper point-blank lied - or provided a legally-truthful answer so contorted it may as well have been a lie - to Representative Wyden when questioned about NSA phone-data collection just a few months ago. You can't take any statement by any authority figure on these types of programs at face value.

Obviously this opens the door to all kinds of unfalsifiable, paranoid conspiracy madness, but that is a direct consequence of the government's unrelenting commitment to maximum secrecy.

aniket_ray2• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I don't know the truth about anything that's going on.

First, I'm not a US citizen. So, it seems I just have to assume that NSA is certainly tracking me.

Now to the topic of spying on US citizens, considering how no one seems to have ever heard about PRISM, the breaking of this story based on flimsy evidence seems to me like an attempt to side track from the real and confirmed story of NSA accessing Call Data Records from Verizon of millions of citizens (The industry calls it CDRs, why have we started calling it "Metadata" since yesterday).

I wouldn't be surprised (though I have no evidence at all) that the PRISM story was planted to change the public discourse.

natch• 13 years ago

Wow, so many weasel words.

So what would satisfy me?

"We minimize intrusions into our users' privacy by encrypting their data on the client side with good crypto algorithms and secure keys that assuming a secure client system are under the full control of our users."

Followed by a list of types of data, and which types are or are not encrypted in this way.

That comes close. It's not exactly PR-speak, but captures the spirit I would hope for.

Google could at least try harder to be proactive about protecting privacy.

pgrote• 13 years ago

If Google is forced to turn over data to the government, but precluded from discussing it due to national security laws then the denial really doesn't mean anything. Right?

Matt_Cutts10• 13 years ago

Personally, I'm really glad that Google published such a clear, plain-spoken post to tackle this issue head on.

This whole issue makes me want to donate a bunch of money to the EFF. If anyone else feels the same way, you can donate to the EFF here: https://supporters.eff.org/donate and I believe a lot of employers will match contributions.

chime6• 13 years ago

EFF is certainly doing a great job right now, so donations are definitely going to help.

Let me ask you this - do you feel 100% comfortable that nobody outside of Google can read your personal gmail?

Matt_Cutts10• 13 years ago

Me personally? I do. I still want Google to up the number of key bits on our SSL connections, plus explore how to make the connection even more secure though. But yes, I'm quite confident.

cloudwizard2• 13 years ago

I have donated even before this. How about Google giving them say $10M to hold some people's feet to the fire?

eduardordm• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but google's response was demagogical at best (what does 'direct access' even means!??!). In many countries the judiciary would already be in the case and the head of those companies (which didn't provide 'direct access' but there is obviously something happening) would have a lot of explanation to do.

aiiane8• 13 years ago

"Direct access" was the wording used in the original article that started this entire debate. All they're doing is responding to the same language they were presented with.

joering2• 13 years ago

This was a TOP SECRET document that leaked out. Page may be well in position not only to deny any knowledge of PRISM, but even further publicly deny Google worked or works with PRISM/NSA.

The way the government bends the law for some years now just to punish everyone they feel like, either through imprisonment, scrutiny or simply by wasting years of their lives, savings of their lives and leaving them with a huge lawyer's bill, I wouldn't be surprised if Page had no choice than to lie on the record. And guess what; if, arguendo, he did, he will be pardoned later on. What would you choose? Admit to a secret program ran by secret agency and face brutal consequences (fines, imprisonment, charge with espionage or maybe capital punishment? (why not? why wouldn't government go after Page "proving" that by admitting US sees everything everyone types to Google, it tipped over some terrorist somewhere that stopped using Google and because of that government lost a track of him until he blew himself up in the middle of crowded street. You get the drift)), or perhaps come up as a good patriot and tell the truth. We already have one that told the truth. He spent 3 years in solitary confinement and may be facing life sentence or capital punishment.

People need to understand. This is too big of a secret even for someone like Page to come up and admit.

ajdecon• 13 years ago

Regardless of the wording, no statement from Google (or Facebook, Apple, etc) is really going to be believed. A denial from innocence is indistinguishable from a denial which is legally compelled by the language of an order form the government.

But to be honest, I don't bear any ill will toward Google on this. Based on their behavior in the past, I'm willing to believe that if this program existed, they pushed back to the extent they felt they could... but if they eventually complied, it's difficult to blame them, given the threats the government is capable of making.

Unfortunately, the only place to resolve this is at the government level, if it can be resolved at all.

Steko2• 13 years ago

Just because the government has access to Google's servers doesn't mean Google gave them that access.

We're all big kids, if you read that the Chinese/Russian/whatever government had access to information straight from Facebook's servers most people wouldn't doubt it for a second and most people would assume they took it through hacking.

So how can you be surprised that NSA is listening to your Skype calls? Maybe they're using a backdoor made for them, maybe they're using a backdoor MS put in for synergy, maybe they threw a million gpus at it for a few years... And maybe they got permissions from MS, or maybe they social hacked it[1], maybe they take it before it gets to MS's servers. Some of those might be illegal and some not but anyone who's surprised or suddenly outraged has been living under a rock since forever.

[1] "It is generally done via secret arrangements not with the company, but with the employees. The company does not provide back-door access, but the people do. The trick is to place people with excellent tech skills and dual loyalties into strategic locations in the company. These 'assets' will then execute the work required in secret, and spare the company and most all of their workmates the embarrassment"

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html

I don't see any citation or evidence given for this so this persons claim could just be idle speculation but it's along the lines of what I'd assume. The NSA treats your privacy as a math problem and routes around it.

T3RMINATED• 13 years ago

If Google is not part of PRISM where is the lawsuit for damaging the image of Google and putting their Trademark in a document that is fake a lie... Where is that slander, PR lawsuit? Google you have billions, if its not true file a lawsuit we will believe you then.

cloudwizard2• 13 years ago

A nice $10M donation to the EFF would help me believe him.

jmadsen• 13 years ago

At some point, I think - perhaps this is only wishful thinking, but I do think it nonetheless - someone from one of these companies will simply come out in a TV interview and spill the beans.

Just make a big enough stir, be explicit about what threats were levied, and tell us all. It would be impossible to prosecute them after that shitstorm.

weinzierl• 13 years ago

The last paragraph sound to me like: "Oh guys, we'd love to tell you what they force us to do, but we can't because we're under gag order.".

Especially the final sentence is explicit:

     But the level of secrecy around the current legal    
     procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.

Am I reading this wrong?

rachelbythebay• 13 years ago

It just occurred to me: the "data liberation" thing they have which lets you download your own data... would be terribly useful for such requests. What better way to scrape the entirety of the various storage systems than to have a team who does nothing but that?

The team itself wouldn't even need to know about it. Just keep them funded and let them stay current on supporting the latest doodad, and it stays useful to the nefarious spy work as well.

grandalf• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838921

onecommentonly4• 13 years ago

A few thoughts: It's unlikely that he cannot deny or admit giving data to NSA /FBI, because he both admitted and denied, albeit with weasel words. No "backdoor" and "no direct access" but maybe from the front door and indirect access :). I suspect that NSA has live access to Google /FB / MS for certain cases, tracking every online move for certain individuals. That's why it costs just $20 million, maybe they created a portal from which they track Person A going from site to site, what he searches for, who he calls, and what he types.

Larry smells the end of his company's "trust us with all your data...all your life on cloud...search while logged in...visit pages with Google Analytics...it's secure" etc. etc etc. While NSA might not catalog everything you do, Google does and everything is there for NSA's and FBI's asking. The more information Google and Facebook (to pick two of the largest) have stored, the worst it is for us. They know EVERYTHING about pages you visit, how long you stay there, what you searched for, what places you went to (Android) what you emailed, foods you liked, what your ordered from ebay, and so on. A treasure trove for NSA, a nightmare for us.

Start thinking! Stay logged out of Google and FB, use hosts file, Ghostery etc to block and make NSA's and FBI's life as hard as possible.

What's good for Google is good for NSA, but not necessarily for you. NSA would love Google Now, wouldn't they?

cpeterso• 13 years ago

Could the NSA have recruited Google employees as moles? The company might not be providing "direct access", but an individual employee might be able to.

What kind of security do companies like Google and Facebook have to protect private user data from employees? I remember reading that Facebook used to (?) allow unfettered access to all private user data until (surprise!) some creepy employees began stalking people.

IanDrake• 13 years ago

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

This is problematic when the government decides the law means you have to give them your data, you can't say no, you can't say anything about it, and if asked you must deny it.

In this day and age, who knows who's telling the truth. When lying becomes law, truth no longer exists.

achalkley• 13 years ago

Drafted at Bilderberg 2013

cromwellian• 13 years ago

There's a new kind of Birther or Truther, let's call them PRISMers. No amount of denials or evidence to the contrary, no matter how they are worded or exposed, will satisfy PRISMers that Google is not uploading all user activity to the NSA. It's just impossible to repair the harm that's been done to the brand by the government.

For some people, I doubt trust can ever be regained. Companies affected by this PRISM program should sue the US Government for damages, or at least sue them until it is completely declassified.

LekkoscPiwa• 13 years ago

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

Great! So if the law - namely the Patriot Act - states the Government has the authority to spy on all your users emails, your legal team reviews it, says it's ok according to the law and you cooperate. Is that how it works?

vijayr• 13 years ago

Does anyone care, outside of tech circles? Most people don't seem to care, even though they understand what's happening

Fuzzwah• 13 years ago

I had to chuckle at Mr Page using the "royal we":

"As Google’s CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the facts."

EGreg• 13 years ago

Is it just me or did the personal statements by Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg have similar format and language?

aayala• 13 years ago

indeed, very similar like a government script ...

7952• 13 years ago

Couldn't a huge amount of metadata be gleaned by just monitoring the size, disposition, and timing of encrypted traffic. That sort of information would only be useful to government and would give them the ability to deny everything.

coherentpony• 13 years ago

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Right, but government-hired contractors are not 'the government'. So while this could be true, users' data could still be being intercepted.

CoryG892• 13 years ago

Everyone please also go read Mark Zuckerberg's response:

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631

Now look at it side-by-side with Larry Page's response. Anyone with half a brain should be scared by this. It really scares me as well. I put more of my trust in Google, and perhaps even Facebook then I place in the Government, or the phone companies, or others. However, these definitely look like they are created from the same template. Very worrying coming from Page and Zuckerberg like this at the exact same time. I just hope there really isn't a man behind the curtain pulling the strings of such powerful figures in technology today.

Does anyone know if there could have been a meeting between these CEOs to decide how they were going to respond. Perhaps they all decided to make their responses uniform together, instead of some external source telling them what to do.

CoryG892• 13 years ago

This just looks like it was crafted from the same template as Mark Zuckerberg's response! Very worrying coming from Page and Zuckerberg, (and I hear other CEOs) like this at the exact same time. I just hope there really isn't a man behind the curtain pulling the strings of such powerful figures in technology today.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

So the gmail access given to government agencies, that allegedly enabled the Chinese to hack it in 2010 - as reported by CNN (http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.ha...) was just a figment of Bruce Schneier's imagination?

Or was it just "indirect access", as in via some other company?

feverishaaron• 13 years ago

There's some undertone about having Drummond listed as the co-author.

When the chief legal officer co-authors a post with a ceo, it means that each word has been carefully chosen, because each of these statements carries serious consequences if they get it wrong.

anonymousab• 13 years ago

Sure thing, Larry. So you won't be afraid to swear as such under oath nor sign a contract stipulating multibillion dollar penalties should this in any way prove to be a lie or deception, right?

icambron• 13 years ago

This is absolutely crammed with weasel wording. With notes:

First, we have not joined [Maybe you didn't "join", but instead merely participated in?] any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access [How about indirect access? What is "direct access", anyway?] to our servers [The reporting suggests the NSA provided some hardware. So I guess it's not your servers, huh?]. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access [There's that weird term again] or a “back door” [With quotes. Nice.] to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday [This one is especially bad. Apparently the NSA didn't tell them the program was called 'PRISM'?]

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law [Note that the government also claims this program is in accordance with the law]. Our legal team reviews each and every request [What's the scope of a request?], and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data [Not what the reports are suggesting] are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records [Which is wholly unrelated to PRISM and Google.]. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false [Such a scale being what, exactly? All of your users' data?].

Note what it doesn't answer:

Does Google provide data to the NSA?

Does the NSA have resources in Google data centers?

Does Google know what these reports about the NSA spying on our Google accounts are all about?

It really doesn't answer those. Lame.

stevewillows• 13 years ago

While I enjoy my tinfoil hat, it seems that they're being open about the access given. This being said, if I didn't trust Google I wouldn't use them. I accept that I am trading certain information about me (interests, usage etc) for the bevvy of free services they provide.

What sort of information about me would the NSA be interested in?

mattbarrie• 13 years ago

Qualified statement "direct". Of course they are not providing "direct" access to production servers. What about "copies"?

jmomo2• 13 years ago

This from the same guy who once gave away access to anyone's data to impress friends.

His quote:

Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.

He has no credibility.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2010/05/report-zuc...;

http://www.newser.com/story/88716/zuckerberg-once-mocked-dum...

paramsingh• 13 years ago

Not the same guy at all...

jmomo2• 13 years ago

Zuckerberg would never give away private info just to impress friends:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2010/05/report-zuc...;

http://www.newser.com/story/88716/zuckerberg-once-mocked-dum...

Udo• 13 years ago

I think they are probably replicating their content in realtime onto government servers, so technically Google et al don't give the NSA any "direct" server access. In practice it's way more convenient to house all that data directly under the NSA/DHS/whatever umbrella than to connect to Google every time they need something.

Using piecemeal "direct access" would also hurt the government's data mining ambitions, so there are a lot of factors that suggest internet companies are simply obligated to stream all their data into a gov black box. This way, everybody wins: the government gets warrant-less, hassle-free access to absolutely everything, the internet companies get freedom from search warrants and NSLs, and they get to use the canned "direct access" denial line which is technically true but is still actually a huge lie.

zmmmmm2• 13 years ago

It's disturbing how similar the language of the different denials is. While individually they are quite convincing (to me, anyway), when you read them one after the other they all have the same "voice". It starts to sound like Orwellian newspeak, exactly how it would sound if all these statements were coordinated by a shadowy background figure.

It may be just an unfortunate coincidence of timing and nature of lawyer laden executive language - but together these statements almost become counterproductive.

adventured11• 13 years ago

With Clapper's admission that Prism is real, I don't understand why it's still a debate as to whether Google / Facebook / Microsoft / Apple are involved.

What Internet companies are they getting information from, such that they wouldn't target the top dozen companies that account for the radical majority of anything you'd want to bother tapping into? Who do people think they're talking about? Excite? Some small local ISP?

They got Verizon and AT&T to sign on to massive scale spying. If they can do that, they can get Google and Facebook and so on. These companies simply have no choice in the matter. You'll recall that Google's anti-trust inquiry recently, conveniently, went away with barely a slap on the wrist.

yarou• 13 years ago

principiis obsta et respice finem

kineticfocus• 13 years ago

Hopefully all this spurs more transparency like Larry suggests. We're certainly on the wrong side of a slippery slope right now. -(says a Canuck who has to deal with this stuff to)

randomfool• 13 years ago

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law."

Would be much better if this were "only when required to by law".

dontbelieveit• 13 years ago

I have a completely different take on this.

While something along the general lines of 'Prism' probably exists, in aggregate, across different NSA programs, I believe the presentation slides are fake and were created / leaked by the executive branch.

Here's my reasoning:

The Slides ----------

Who is the audience????

Who were these slides prepared for? Who is the target audience? If real, the information is obviously very, very sensitive- so it follows that the original audience would have been very, very high level.

But who at that high of a level needs this type of explanation for a project that started years ago?? It reads more like something you would create for someone that has never heard of it. Doesn't make sense.

Slide Design

Gee- nice of the creator to put the logos of each of the companies at the top of the slide- of every slide. Which leads me to ask...

Where are the rest of the slides?

Was it only a 4 slide presentation? Who gives super-high level presentations with only 4 slides? If there were more than 4 slides, were the company logos across the top of EVERY page? Does that even make sense?

It's also interesting that the 4 slides present such a simple, easy to understand story line- it reads like the target audience is a school tour - not super-secret-high-level-officials-(hearing about it for the first time).

Prism Logo

Who made the logo? The NSA graphic design office? Seriously, why would a program like that have a logo? For marketing purposes??

Prism has a web page!

From the bottom of slide 3- "Complete list and details on Prism web page: Go PRISMFAA" A web page? Even if it's private to the NSA it's absurd.

The Political Angle (motive) ----------------------------

IRS - Big Government Story

The IRS / Tea Party story was looking very, very bad for the administration. It's one thing for Republicans / Libertarians to say big government is bad - you play that off as partisan politics. The average person goes about their day.

The IRS is different- EVERYONE deals with the IRS. The narrative was a simple one - IRS abuses power to attack political enemies. That scares people- pretty much everyone.

The Obama administration is all about big government - they don't see it as a bad thing. They believe government is in a unique position to help people. If the electorate turns against 'big government', whatever agenda Obama has for the next 3 year would be finished. The IRS story is a very big deal.

Incredibly Savvy Political Operators

The Obama political team is a force to be reckoned with. Between incredible political savvy and incredible data analysis, they have taken the political game to an entirely new level. They are very, very good.

How does one 'fix' this problem? A tried and true solution is for a bigger story to come along and eclipse the 'problem' story. In the Wag The Dog world, you would start a war. But that's just a movie.

What would be a perfect story? How about a story that simultaneously eclipses the IRS story, while blurring the big government issue?

That's just what happened. The NSA story is at an abstract level the same as the IRS story- it's about big government run amok. However, by rolling the two together Obama can claim 'security' as a trump card. It only really applies to the NSA part of the story - but the press isn't big on subtle distinctions, so no worries there.

Timing

Is it a coincidence the Washington Post broke the story just as the evening news was starting on the West Coast? IE - the end of the day's news cycle? That gives a full day for the press to roll the IRS stories up and for the President to make a presidential statement about security. Sum it all up on the evening news and gee - look at that - it's Friday. Time for a summer weekend.

Denials -------

All the firms listed in the slide presentation header have denied the story. Yes the language they used is very similar but at the same time it is the same language used by the press ("direct access"). The denials sound pretty believable to me. Even if Larry Page were under some gag order, I doubt he'd say something along the lines of 'I've never heard of it.' I think he'd follow the letter of the law (gag order), but not the spirit.

This is a long post - and my first post (long time lurker though).

In a nutshell:

The slide presentation looks very 'Made for TV' The timing is SUPER convenient.

Thoughts?

mgiiu1• 13 years ago

Several of the largest telephone carriers in the United States knowingly and voluntarily assisted the National Security Agency in illegally spying, the online companies I feel have more too lose if they took that kind of mindless attitude. Online companies monetize user data so consumers may lose faith in the companies ability to protect their data from government if they have "direct access". Online firms adopted a aggressive, pro-privacy legal theories. The problem isn't about direct access, the friendly benefits the intelligence community gets with current structuring of federal law is what needs to be changed for more respect to privacy in our society.

gridmaths• 13 years ago

Missing from this cynical legal response, is the outrage towards the government for spying on all our private communications [ both legally and illegally ]

Google could have used their platform to campaign for better laws : a 'free speech + question mark' logo on their home page outlining their concerns would have been consistent with 'Dont be Evil'.. but they didn't even do that.

A not-just-non-evil-but-actively-good Google should have said to the Government : "No, you may not have any access to our customers data - you need to physically raid our buildings with a warrant to prise that from our stewardship. You need to hold us as a company in contempt of court."

How much better is the US than China ? : how can there be a democracy without both free speech and a right to private conversation ?

lifeguard5• 13 years ago

"Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

jchimney• 13 years ago

Maybe the larger point is that they don't need permission

svdad• 13 years ago

Ok, let's read this closely. It doesn't seem to me like Larry and David are really denying much of anything.

"Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers."

Sure, that's fine. But the fact that the initial PPT gives a specific date on which Google cooperation began already suggests that Google may be handing over data, not that the gov't is sucking it all down automatically.

Also, they say "data centers" in particular. Data travels over lots of other pipes.

"We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."

Not surprising the NSA wouldn't tell them the secret code name of the project in their discussions.

"we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process."

This is an enormous loophole. "in accordance to the law" could mean anything, and with automated review systems the volume of data passing through could be massive.

"Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period."

Not providing "open-ended acces" does not mean not providing any access.

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist."

But not surprised to learn that other not-so-broad orders exist. How broad is too broad?

"Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."

Not "on such a scale", but on a slightly smaller scale, sure.

"there needs to be a more transparent approach"

In other words, we wish we could tell you about everything we're doing with the NSA, but we aren't allowed to.

Really this doesn't read like any sort of denial at all.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

If these companies truly were innocent they would immediately sue press for slander. The fact that they all posted a denial that are all exactly same worded says everything imo.

Steer• 13 years ago

I'm sure many people have said the same thing much more eloquently than I can, but what I find extra depressing in all this is that we all obviously want to take advantage of the possibilities that the Internet gives us, but while people are prosecuted right and left for sharing a song the government (any government) can do things on a scale which we can only dream of. We're all connected, but has it empowered us or has it made us into a bunch of sheep?

What happened to the government working for us, the people? Yes, I'm sure I'm naive, but still.

I don't see this getting better before it gets worse. Sorry.

dude3• 13 years ago

Google gave the Chinese gov direct access that's how they got hacked.

jlebar• 13 years ago

We should really read what the Times has to say about this before we engage in armchair investigation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

jtormey• 13 years ago

The denials sound like a politician denying he had an affair...and in the end it turns out to be true. PRISM at least expresses the intent of the government, which trashes our right to privacy, probable cause,etc. The only right to privacy these days is if you're having an abortion.

Larry Page addresses PRISM

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