From the statement:
"Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it."
From Google's:
"Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false. "
What about that is weasely or unclear to you? They categorically deny providing broad data to the government. Of course they can't say they don't provide any access, because they're obligated by law to comply with warrants. But the accusation was that they provide direct access (those words that you all are so obsessed with appear in the Guardian article), with the implication that the NSA can just go and take whatever data it wants with no oversight.
Unless you believe that Apple, Google, et al. are just plain lying, that is clearly not the case.
Since when would anyone start to lump NSA in with "law enforcement". The focus on law enforcement in general in that statement is curious since that's not really what all the noise has been about.
Maybe their PR team are just a bunch of buffoons that have still not realised that these statements gets dissected, but it is rather odd that they when releasing a statement to try to stem criticism based on their previous choice of words again choose wording that is so ambiguous
In fact, if I were to trust this (and I can't decide if I should), my main reason for trusting them is that I'm wondering if they wouldn't just flat out lie and give a much stronger denial if they are in fact feeding the NSA with tons of data.
I wonder if they serve their requests via that branch, or another. it'd be convenient to serve the requests from a more bureaucratic branch of the agency in order to allow them to fall outside of "law enforcement requests".
Are you bothering to understand what the OP was trying to say or just trolling and calling it a day?
I didn't express any personal opinion on whether Google or Apple leak large amounts of data or not, and in fact I don't have any. I just can understand people wondering about the usage of this phrase and was trying to explain their possible motives.
I also have a hard time believing they're getting DB dumps, even so- Facebook alone would be a DB dump at an insane scale. Unless they're only taking in textual data, which of course could be a lot more manageable.
I also have to wonder what one of the slides means(and maybe this is an opportunity for someone to enlighten me): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
What is it referring to as the 'cost' being $20m a year? There's no way that could be the total program cost- that'd barely employ the engineers required to build out the system, let alone the data scientists, analysts, and more that would have to support the system. Nor could it count for hardware costs.
So then in that case, is it an advertising packet for other agencies to hop on? Only $20m to have access to their firehose? Genuinely curious here if anyone's figured this one out.
"Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities."
It may very well be that they have not had to deal with any broad requests from intelligence agencies, but the statement most certainly does not preclude it.