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).
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.
I missed the pictures of the slides. That said, there are ways to target these services without involving the companies directly. Up to and including espionage itself.
One of the earlier articles discussed the government's concerns about keeping the program secret, lest they lose the cooperation of their private sector partners. That isn't a concern that they'd have if they were implementing the program through espionage.
> 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.
