Re:NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
by mpyne on Sunday June 16, 2013 @11:20AM
(#5888710)
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.
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.