I stand in admiration of your capacity to Make Stuff Up, then treat your own utterances as received wisdom, e.g. "Obama is a conservative President".
You are Teh Man.
Meanwhile, where is the next installment of Karl's Folly?

Told kid about nano-cam dust today. He's only 4 years old, so he didn't know about them yet, and I'm trying to teach him basic hygiene. I explained for that for nearly a a hundred years we have all lived in an environment where other peoples' cameras are always in our homes. We track them in, on our shoes. The AC intake blows them in. The servers the cameras send video too, aren't owned by people who are practicing subterfuge. It's not like they snuck "spy" dust onto our porches in the hopes we'd track them in. It just happens; it's an inevitable consequence of the stuff blowing around everywhere.

My great grandparents complained about it. They thought they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, because nanotech was new. They didn't see the dust, so they didn't know it was there. In the absence of sensual confirmation, the default expectation (at least to the layman) was that it wasn't there. That was naive, but my grandparents didn't work with nanotech or even use consumer models themselves, so perhaps their ignorance could be forgiven. (Just as my own ignorance of hyperspace can perhaps be forgiven, since I'm not a miner.)

My grandparents, though, grew up with the stuff, though it was still a bit expensive, so it wasn't totally ubiquitous yet. By their time, almost everyone at least knew about it, and if in a gathering of any five people you were to say "nobody sees me inside my home," chances were there would have been a few guffaws and someone would likely point out that the statement was likely incorrect. Sometimes the stuff got innocently tracked into your house, and sometimes it was manipulated into getting there, through subterfuge. The law and social norms lagged, though, and people debated privacy a lot.

By the time their children (my parents) grew up, though, it was all over. Everyone knew about nano-cam dust, and unless you did a rad-flash a few minutes earlier, fucking in your own bed was just as public as doing it in Times Square.

And now my kid knows too. It's just something everyone is expected to know about and deal with. If I were to write a story about it, I think I would set the story in the time of my grandparents, back when society was truly conflicted and in the midst of change. I bet those were interesting times.

Remind me again who's been in charge of charge of the House, the Senate, and the White House for most of Obama's tenure? Sure, a Republican was pushing for this pork. But it passed a Senate and a White House both controlled by Democrats, either of which could have easily stopped it. Neither did. In fact, depending upon the timeline (which I'm too busy to fully look up at the moment), it's possible the Democrats were in control of the House as well at the time this was going on. I can't recall exactly when the Republicans took over the House.

The truth here is the entire system is contemptible. Both Republicans and Democrats bear equal responsibility for this debacle. And to suggest there aren't billions and billions of dollars of pork barrel projects championed by Democrats is disingenuous at best.

No but if you got a government request for your keys you'd know about it.

The government "request" would come in form of customised malware and you'd never even know you got hacked.

If google gets such a request you wouldn't know you were compromised.

You aren't gonna know, no matter what.

It isn't like they are sending l33t hackers to break in and get the data.

Schmidt isn't an idiot, despite how the press like to portray him via selective quoting (note that TFA does not provide much context for this quote). When he says Google is the safest place to put your data, he's probably comparing Google to other companies that provide similar services, not some hypothetical fully self hosted system - bearing in mind self hosting of email is rapidly going the way of the dodo even in business situations (it died for home email a long time ago).

Given that Yahoo still have not fully deployed SSL everywhere let alone encrypted their internal datacenter links, and if Microsoft have a similar effort they aren't talking about it, there's some evidence that he might be right. After all, if you get a government warrant for your data you're just as stuck as Google is: not much you can do about it. On the other hand, you are unlikely to secure your infrastructure as well as Google does.

But Google makes money from targeted advertising

Google makes significant sums of dough from paying corporate customers who use Google Apps. These clients can switch off advertising if they like. These are also the places where some of the most sensitive data is stored.

So Google have both the financial means and incentive to solve the end to end crypto problem for such clients. The difficulty is not financial. It's technological. Matching even just the feature set of Gmail with end to end crypto is insanely hard, and that's before you hit the "everything is a web app" problem.

The point of forward secrecy is there are no such keys to seize. The "master keys" are only used for identification, not encryption. So whilst a gov could theoretically seize Google's keys, this does not help them decrypt wire traffic. They'd have to do a large MITM attack, and to get everything? They'd have to decrypt and forward ALL Google's traffic. Not feasible.

Good use of applied cryptography means that realistically the only way for a government to get data out of it means requesting it specifically from the providers. In places where the warrant system has been vapourised (which certainly includes the USA and UK), this might not seem like much, but it does help prevent fishing expeditions.