Vivisection. Public vivisection.

Strap these organizations down and cut them the fuck open with no regard for their wellbeing. If the procedure kills them, then so be it.

There is a threshold past which live dissection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Recovery_of_the_Stasi_fi...) is the only way that trust can be restored. I assert we have run across that threshold. And before anyone whines about it; no, we are not as bad as the Stasi yet. The Stasi do not represent the position of the threshold, they were miles past it.

Incidentally, this would be a great advance on Zuckerberg's professed goal of making the world a more open place. Safer or better would be arguable - more open would not be.

Oh, don't get me wrong, we certainly should not start with Facebook.

Going after Facebook would probably be unnecessary after we were through with the accused government organizations. At that point Facebook's innocence would either be clear, or it would be clear that Facebook was a victim in this. If we found reason to believe both of these were not true, then we could pursue them as well.

I think the exploration of the answer to this question is about the most frightening implication of this whole mess

That's the problem. I don't think I we can accept anything at this point. We literally cannot trust our government, or the corporations under its control, to be telling us the truth.

I don't think we can accept much as proof now seeing as the trust between client and service has been broken. Hopefully this whole debacle will drive new zero-knowledge services to take over. Let us use your servers and tools, we can handle the contents of our data.

This simple question raises so many interesting problems.

Perhaps I should defer to Jean Chretien... "A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven."

Honestly though - I don't know. It's why I asked.

Possibly they can't, because how do you prove you're not lying other than saying you're not lying? It's not like there's some sort of an unshakable, absolute truth hardware log that details every single data access.

> how do you prove you're not lying other than saying you're not lying?

There is something called "evidence" used exctly at those circunstances.

Of course, I have no idea what kind of evidence those companies or the US government have, they are not telling anybody. And that is evidence that they are lying.