Exactly where are these convincing arguments that google is sending all e-mail to the NSA? Links? Data? Do you have anything that supports this at all?
There is the telephone stuff that was leaked, which has been well known since 2006 [0]. But, where is this miraculous evidence that google is handing everything over to the NSA?
[0] http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.h...
As a "non-US person", I read all the "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law" explanations from Google/Apple/Yahoo/Facebook et al - as saying "Oh, you want our data from that guy in Australia? Sure, that's 'in accordance with the law' - here's all his email… Anything else you'd like? His social graph? His contact list/address book? His Adwords clickthroughs? His Google Analytics enabled website visits? Oh look, it seems he accidentally put his GPG private key into his GoogleDrive folder - have that too!"
Do you really find it surprising that people outside the US see Snowdon's revelations and the US government's reactions to strongly suggest this is the only sensible interpretation? _All_ the denials/re-assurances we're seeing are of the form "in accordance with the law", then going on to talk about presumed protection against _domestic_ spying, and the 4th amendment rights of US citizens. None of which is reassuring from where I sit.
I still see that "Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law." glaring out at me from the middle of that denial.
My suspicious mind now reads phrases like " … and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process" and "Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period", as saying "so long as 'correct process' includes a FISA rubber stamp, and that '(claims of) open-ended access to our users' can only be true if it includes all domestic US users" - then sure, we can say that while still handing over _all_ data on non-US users -it's still _technically_ true.
This is for me, kinda like when someone you thought was a close friend gets married and doesn't invite you to the wedding - nothing's actually changed, but you now view everything differently. Right now I've got that "Oh, _that's_ how it is huh? I guess that explains a few things, I wish I'd known earlier…" feeling - complete with that sense of foolishness for ever having thought things were different.
It might be paranoid - or it might just be pragmatic. Either way, things _are_ different now. I just didn't get invited to The US's wedding, while Apple, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Skype, TeamViewer, PayPal, eBay, Digital Ocean, Linode, Rackspace, Dropbox, Evernote, Trello, Freshbooks, and a bunch of others all did. Now I have to re-evaluate all those relationships too.
How paranoid is it to wonder if I can trust 1Password any more?
To ask for "Links? Data? Do you have anything that supports this at all?" is asking the wrong question, since the amount that is public is incredibly small (just a tiny fraction would be my guess, but all we can do is make estimates). The question is, Is it reasonable to assume that there is more surveillance? The answer is yes, and to assume that there is detailed email surveillance, either at the ISP level, through backdoors, or through direct cooperation is not unreasonable.
I'd suggest _not_ assuming that might be considered negligent.
So e.g. if you're a US company that has a competitor in China, and you don't want the Chinese company to read your email, it's a sensible precaution to encrypt it.
I'm somewhat less concerned about rogue individual sysadmins curiously snooping on my mail, than I am about the NSA's comprehensive perpetual archive.