> If they wanted the moral high ground, they should have sued years ago.

Google has received high marks from the EFF for fighting for users' privacy rights in the courts and in congress for three years:

https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013

https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2012

https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2011

This lawsuit is just a continuation of what they have already been doing for years.

The EFF report was compiled prior to the Snowden revelations. There is no star rating for "Allowing warrantless access to a user's data in contravention to the 4th Amendment". I should think in the current climate only Lavabit would receive a positive rating from the EFF.

Also, remember the initial reaction of the NSA partner companies when they were confronted about their mass surveillance activities for the first time?

They lied straight to our faces and thought we would just accept that and continue to buy and/or use their stuff.

Please link to the lies. As far as I can tell, the line has always been "we comply with legal orders", "we do not offer direct access", "no one has our private keys/broken our encryption". The only contradiction is peoples' interpretation of vague "direct access" mention in a PowerPoint deck.

Microsoft reiterated their position, explained that yes, they review every order, they do not just dump data on all customers over some private link, the encryption is sound, but of course they need to hand over data they do have.

If I'm wrong on this, I'd certainly appreciate a correction.

They happen to omit that they got paid for delivering peoples private information to the NSA.

Its one thing to be forced to deliver some kind of information against your will. It something else if you do it like a shop, providing goods in return for revenue.

Did they deliver private information without a legal order to do so? If they were legally obligated to do something which has a non-negligable cost, they are entitled to compensation. In the same way that you might have to pay for a FOIA request, because it costs money to provide the data.

Yes, if a factory is legally ordered to make a weapon to be used against innocents, of course they should both make it and get paid for that. The law is the law, and it costs money to make the weapon.

This was fairly mainstream news...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

If it walks like a duck... The NSA's Bluffdale UT facility is obviously built to handle more than a few thousand FISA requests. More like it could handle a quadrillion such "requests".