No, I am arguing that AT&T rolled over (and, as it turns out from today's Gellman piece in WaPo, took money from the USG to do it), while Google fought back. But commenters on boards like this are happy to shit all over Google because (a) any allegation that Google rolled over to the USG confirms their biases, (b) they're inclined to put people into binary "agrees with me entirely" or "disagrees with me entirely" buckets that presume anyone who argues with them must be apologizing for NSA, and (c) because it's fun to talk about big companies like Google being evil and less fun to talk about them working hard not to be.

You think these are mundane semantics. I think they're more meaningful than that. People on HN can't get me to shut over the right fix for a CSRF bug or how taxicabs can be licensed; why would anyone think I'd back down on an issue like this?

It's more that a lot of people are more inclined to trust a leaked NSA document that claims NSA does the type of things that people already believed NSA does, including when it implicates Google, than a Google PR denial of a very specific interpretation of the same.

In the absence of more evidence about what exactly PRISM does, what we have is guesswork, but guesswork where believing some interpretation of the NSA documents becomes easier the more revelations of extensive NSA surveillance via other channels that are coming out.

If they didn't want to be "evil" they shouldn't have been collecting these gigantic amounts of data without properly protecting them from parties such as the NSA.

For all the promotion they put into two-factor authentication for account-safety, "suspicious login attempt" notifications, etc, if they had done the same for GPG in GMail/Chrome, that would have been a huge step towards giving the mainstream a taste of actually being in control of their own privacy, I'm not saying we wouldn't have this problem right now, but we'd be in a way better position of dealing with it, for sure.

edit: to be clear, that is one of the many reasons why I think this arguing about whether this access is "direct" or whether it's "sorta kinda direct" distracts from the real issue: access.

Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but how does Google offer to provide people 4GB of email and storage... without actually storing that?

And like you yourself mention, to add security to prevent automated hacking scripts from 0wning accounts to add to a botnet (attempts that happen orders of magnitude more often than an NSL or FISA warrant) they have to add IP tracking for individual accounts.

You talk about GPG but there's little safe way to do that from client-side JS, would defeat most of the point of offering free email for Google in the first place, and is already supported just by offloading that onto a real email client.

I don't want you to shut up or back down. I am just baffled by your priorities and incoherent sense of scale.

Here we have revelations by the NSA, that analysts can listen to anyone's phone calls. In America. This subverts just about the entire spirit of the Constitution and some of the letter.

But, you would rather spend your time isolating some relatively minute detail that Snowden or others may or may not have gotten wrong.

And the thing is, neither you nor anyone here even knows enough to draw conclusions as to these minute details. A few weeks ago, we didn't know that the NSA was collecting metadata on so many calls. A few days ago, we didn't know that analysts were eavesdropping without warrants. Yet people like yourself would argue vehemently on behalf of the government. The more that comes out proving you wrong, the more you dig in and move the goalposts. It makes one wonder what the government would have to do to actually concern you.

And the thing is, while you argue things you couldn't possibly know, there are now enough solid facts coming out (including admissions by the NSA) that should be of grave concern to you. Yet, here you are again focused on trivial, unprovable details.

I won't argue the subjective notion of whether the details are mundane. That's opinion. But, I don't understand how anyone can have such a skewed sense of scale when comparing the relative importance of what you choose to argue versus that of the astonishing revelations being brought to light about our government.