There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no 
    indirect access, no back door, no drop box.

However at this point Google is trying to prove a negative, that it does not knowingly participates in covert surveillance of its users. ( With the added complexity, that AdWords analytics should qualify as surveillance.) So Google will have a very hard time to convince me. However a published privacy policy, verified by a third party, would go quite a long way.

[1] http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/?h...

If the media claims turn out to be true nobody is going to think "Oh, Google was telling the truth the whole time!" As I mentioned, there is no practical difference between this statement being "true" in the sense that you creatively "read" it and an outright lie. No reasonable person would read these statements in the way that you have.

You seem to be having a really hard time simultaneously holding the idea that the media reports are correct and the idea that Google/the big tech industry is trustworthy, hence the mental gymnastics. You're going to have to drop one of those two ideas. You will eventually.

So implying something, while actually reporting something different is a lie, but it is a highly specific type of lie. And it is quite often quite interesting to do these mental gymnastics to uncover the sliver of truth in these statements.

"What the ...?" Posted: Friday, June 07, 2013

Dear Google users—

You may be aware of press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret U.S. government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to our servers. As Google’s CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the facts.

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. 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.

Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed—there needs to be a more transparent approach. Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive. We post this information on our Transparency Report whenever possible. We were the first company to do this. And, of course, we understand that the U.S. and other governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety—including sometimes by using surveillance. But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.

Posted by Larry Page, CEO and David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer

A huge corporation? Lying? About doing stuff that's harmful to their image -- stuff that they would have been pressured to lie about and deny them anyway?

Please. Next thing you'll tell us that there's no Santa Claus!