In retrospect, much "unreasonable tinfoil" has turned out to be fact. Assuming collusion is the safest bet, these days.

riding ockham's razor is a religion for some. but that's ok.

> That seems like pretty unreasonable tinfoil. There is no reason for Microsoft to want to give information to governments.

No? I don't think you are being fair.

First of all Microsoft is not one mind. There are lots of motivations bouncing around inside that entity, and not all of those motivations are 'reasonable' like you purport to be.

Second, secret court orders get issued to these big companies all the time. You don't know what kind of affordances Microsoft has provided for US and foreign government and intelligence services.

> I assume they don't pay ...

Oh let's not be pollyannaish, any contract work done for governments would be paid work. Cha-CHING! I see dolla signs. $$$

It's infinitely reasonable to distrust large internet companies that gather interesting user data. paule89 just came right out and says what a lot of us reasonable folk are thinking.

Maybe someone at Microsoft's decided it would be more profitable to salvage the Skype name and introduce some real end-to-end encryption just like the competition has. Or, maybe Microsoft is helping the Five Eyes to use Skype + Signal as a big real-world test bed for cracking or weakening Signal's encryption. I mean, it's just impossible to know what's really going on here.

Highly plausible, but I would suggest the reason would more likely be competition than anything else. Right now Skype's biggest competitor is whatsapp which is growing quickly, has end to end encryption and you dont need a skype name and password you've probably forgotten.

>That seems like pretty unreasonable tinfoil

Doesn't seem so to me.

>I assume they don't pay

You're dead wrong, my friend. They do pay. A lot. Think of all those juicy government contracts.

If they pay for more access than is required, why wasn't that in the documents Snowden dumped? Instead, we saw the normal court rulings requiring companies to comply with data access requests.

I mean, paying Microsoft (among the rest of the tech giants) for more access than is required was in the leaks, in the form of the PRISM program.

You don't understand PRISM. PRISM was a system for processing the data that the companies were legally required to send.

PRISM is/was a small program. "Upstream" programs is the what most should be worried about and goes sort of around companies (and anyone/anything else).

Though, some companies are handed a court order to "share" their data (quarterly, about 80 companies so far). And NSA has standard rates for this.

They don't "share" the data, and the NSA doesn't pay for it. The slides clearly show that the data requests are consumed by the FBI, which is the organization that the companies deal with.

Because Snowden dropped the infinity motherload: a complete information drop, accurate well into 2018, all questions answered, all suspicions allayed.

This is a legitimate argument in 2018? You're not spied on because... tinfoil?

If only consumers cared. As it stands there's very little downside to handing information over to government(s), and I would assume some upsides (back scratching).

Apple might actually be making consumers care in an odd way by making it such a public issue.

In some jurisdictions, even Apple unreasonably hands over data.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/apple-sets-date-for-china-d...

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/business-42631386

Absolutely. I'm just referring to the high profile news around specific events that might have made people think about it briefly. Possibly more effective than any hand wringing we might do.

Without addressing the tinfoilery... ummm... have you ever actually looked at the size of government contracts in the US? They're usually the largest customer any Fortune 500 company has, so large that losing them as a customer would destroy the company. There are a handful of exceptions, but for most companies, they are very much not going to bite the hand that feeds them. If daddy asks for access, daddy gets access. That's one of the reasons I support making ISPs a municipal public utility. Municipal governments will tell the government to pound sand if they don't have a court order with a judges seal. Any private company in the US will only open the door for them and ask if they've had a chance to review their bid on the latest government contract.