Well, since nearly all Google traffic is encrypted, equipment just outside their networks wouldn't do much good. And Google considers all data in any way related to users to be user data

That could certainly be. However, Google security is pretty deep, and focuses at least as much on securing against insider threats as outsider threats. Those NSA employees would have to be extremely well-placed. (I work for Google, on security infrastructure, which means I know whereof I speak, but also that I can't provide much detail.)

Where that's what the law says, then yes. I think it's very clear that we have some deep public policy problems. However, Google's claim is that the number of requests they receive is small and affects only a tiny number of users. Unfortunately, the law doesn't allow them to be more specific, which is why they're suing.

Agreed. We absolutely need more transparency, and it's great that a company with the clout and resources of Google is pushing for it. It doesn't even matter whether they're pushing for it because they think it's a good thing in general or because the allegations are damaging to their business model.

That is a problem, indeed. It's why Google has filed suit against the DoJ, because Google can't provide the details needed to defend itself.

Cite? As far as I know, the telecoms never lied. They refused to answer, and then eventually admitted to it. I could be wrong, however, since my memories of the details are fuzzy. But a few web searches seem to support my recollections. Yes, they definitely were shielded from any legal consequences.

But even if Google were shielded from legal consequences, Google could not be shielded from the extremely severe and irreparable PR consequences. Google might be able to recover from proof of the allegations by coming clean and promising to do better, but proof that the allegations were true and that Google lied would be disastrous for a company with Google's current business model. Remember that unlike the telecoms which have local monopolies, a national oligopoly and fairly high switching costs, Google's competition is just a click away.

I see three options:

1. Google is telling the truth.
2. Google is lying and is absolutely certain that it can never, ever be proven.
3. Google's executives are idiots.

I know 3 is false, and arguably it would have to be true for Google's execs to believe that their lies could never be proven, per 2. I think they're telling the truth.

(Disclaimer: I should mention that I work for Google. However, if the PRISM allegations were supported, I probably wouldn't be working for Google much longer, and neither would an awful lot of other people, including many who are far more talented and valuable than I am.)

I don't think tapping Google's fiber would do the NSA that much good. All traffic between gmail servers and gmail users is encrypted. They could get traffic between Google's SMTP servers and other mail providers, because although Google uses SMTP over TLS when talking to any other provider that supports it, few do, but messages between gmail accounts are never transmitted in cleartext.

If you argue that the NSA can lean on certificate authorities to let them spoof Google certs, I think that approach is unlikely to succeed. First, even if CAs cooperated the NSA would need to use it sparingly, because it's likely that eventually someone would notice that they're getting different -- though apparently valid -- certs, especially since all valid certs from Google should be issued by Google's CA. Second, the fact that Chrome pins all Google certs by default makes the odds of discovery even higher. In fact, that's how the DigiNotar compromise was surfaced; someone tried to use the compromised signing key to spoof a Google cert and Chrome threw up big red error pages.

The tool shows what the NSA could know about you if they had access to your gmail. However, Google rather staunchly maintains that the NSA does not have any access to Google user data, with the exception of specific information about specific individuals when proper legal documentation has been provided and reviewed by Google's legal team, and even then the NSA does not have access to Google's servers; Google retrieves the specific data requested by the order and delivers it to the requestor.

In addition to the previous public statements, David Drummond just published the following op-ed in faz.net (in German): http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gastbeitrag-von-david-drummond-gleichgewicht-zwischen-sicherheit-und-buergerrechten-12272710.html. Here's a Google+ post that contains an English translation: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105603626919803672092/posts/bT7ndyhJmUk

Unless Google is flat-out lying of course. I don't believe that is true; I don't think Google could be legally compelled to lie, and I don't think the CEO and legal counsel legally can lie to the public, but you have to make your own evaluation on that point.

The statement you gave is how it was sold, and is also a reasonable enough reason for the intervention in Bosnia. It does not cover Kosovo. Furthermore, look at the what the Muslim Bosniaks and Muslim Albanians have done since the NATO intervention - ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims from Sarejevo and ethnic cleansing of Serbs from most of Kosovo. There are incidents like the following all the time, initiated by Albanian Kosovars and usually ignored by Kosovo police:
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/attack-on-serb-children-a-shameful-act

What I'm saying is that how the NATO intervention was sold to us covered up inconvenient truths about the people we were helping. Furthermore, Western media chooses to ignore anything that is not on their "Narrative". When Muslims attack Serbs it is ignored by the West, no matter how systematic and frequent it is. If the Serbs react (which is relatively rare) then it will be flashed up. Sure, both sides should stop the attacks. However, our journalists are applying double standards. You ought to keep this in mind (and update your knowledge of the situation - your statements look about a decade out of date and could probably use refreshing with the reality of what has happened since the limelight left the region).

Furthermore, the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has a *significant* impact in the progress of their 'Cultural Jihad' that is sweeping across America as we speak (where they do a Jedi mind trick on the weak minded to lower resistance to Islamicization and Cultural Marxism):
http://www.muslimbrotherhoodinamerica.com/

ps. Obama and the Leftists Democratic leadership clearly have a marriage of convenience with the Muslim Brotherhood to break down the traditional (that is, 'classical liberal'/conservative/libertarian) position of American society. The fall of Morsi in Egypt is a great day for the Free World - even if most people don't know it or understand what is really going on (because many politicians and most media are keeping the truth from them):
http://frontpagemag.com/

You do realize that Bill Clinton initiated several wars that killed thousands of innocent Serbs - to deflect attention from his peccadillos. Even if you agree that NATO should have intervened in Bosnia then you need to consider Kosovo as a separate case. In Kosovo Bill Clinton effectively helped the Islamicist Albanians ethniclly cleanse Serbians from Serbian territory. Please go and do the research. You won't hear the facts from the mainstream media as they are lying to you. Which is why you think Bill and Hilliary Clinton are great - when in fact they are terrible once you get past their veil of lies. GW Bush may have had plenty of faults (eg. not bright) but he didn't lie like the Clinton's did - think about it, despite all the pressure to find WMDs in Iraq (which had been moved to Syria by that time) or fake their presence he had to concede they weren't there. Which meant he didn't lie when he said he thought they were there, and he didn't lie when they weren't found. All of Bill and Hilliary Clinton and Obama are pathological liars. The reason you can't see this is because the veil of lies that the mainstream media put up - they have you in the Matrix. It's up to discover the truth about the International Leftist agenda (eg. using Islamic immigration and the Muslim Brotherhood against its foes), if you want:
http://frontpagemag.com/
http://www.breitbart.com/

Don't forget the Second Amendment - whose purpose is to remind citizens and their government of the right of citizens to keep and bear arms to put the government in its rightful place - serving the people - rather than what you have now with the Obama Administration (where the people are farmed for votes and taxes to further an agenda which doesn't match the will of the majority).

Actually the 2nd Amendment is all about resisting tyrranny. That's why people who understand the US Constitution resisted Obama's grab at the firearms the Constitution grants them to resist tyranny. The rest of your post is simply incorrect, it appears you need to do a lot more homework. The "Tea Party" pronouncements explain the Constitution in the modern age fairly well. Now, you have probably been trained by the Cultural Marxists in the media to recoil in horror at the mention of the word "Tea Party". They do this so you never look closely at what the Tea Party *actually* say, which can be summarized as "Let's get back to Constitutional principles". You might them understand why your post was so off-base and unfortunately, nonsense.

I suggest you read up on the barbarity of Sharia (which cannot be questioned by a "true" Muslim, incidentally, lest they become an apostate and therefore be subject to the death penalty). What is not important is what the proponents of Sharia have to say (Muslims are allowed to lie if it promotes Islam, it is called "taqiyya") but instead examine what the critics of Sharia have to say as they give a realistic picture. Incidentally, there are already 87 Sharia courts operating in Britain and numerous cases in the US where Sharia has trumped the US Constitution due to politically Left-leaning activist judges. Sharia is *evil* and against everything in the UN Declaration of Human Rights! (which is why the Islamists came up with a Sharia-compliant "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights" which opposes all the rights in the UN declaration).

It would cost a lot more than that.

Airports would have to be completely redesigned to provide massive security processing halls, staffed by hundreds, if not thousands, of security personnel to handle the high volumes of US air travel at major airports. Passengers would also have to be willing to accept 1-2 hours going through security as a norm, with particularly busy times and days being even worse. They would also have to accept having all of their bags hand-searched and being questioned about any unusual items, and they would have to accept being interrogated in detail about their reasons for travel, what they did, where they went, who they met with... and they would have to accept the investigators actually checking up on their statements. And if they ever got comfortable with this, they'd have to accept further increases in the level of scrutiny, because the whole purpose of all of it is to make them uncomfortable and nervous, so that the security personnel can watch their reactions.

If you've ever been through Israeli security, you know that you don't want to go through that ordeal on a regular basis.

Indeed.

My stats (from the website of the public library where I work) for the entire second quarter show Eight lagging a couple percentage points behind Vista, but since it's increasing, that may no longer be the case at the end of the quarter. (The traffic volume on our site doesn't, in my judgment, really support looking at very much less than a quarter at a time, so I generally don't.)

But yeah, what you said: Vista has been on the decline here since early 2010. It peaked at about 25% usage share (a little more than half of what the then-leading version, XP, had) sometime in the second quarter of that year. 25%, incidentally, is several (perhaps five) times as much share as Eight has now.

It's also worth pointing out that Vista has less than two-thirds the usage share that XP has, and XP has less than one-third the usage share that Seven has. (Again, that's all for the whole second quarter.) Eight has roughly a tenth as much share as Seven.

Also, Eight is in a dead heat with Snow Leopard (Eight comes out slightly ahead of Snow Leopard on my numbers, but statistically, at our level of traffic, it's a wash) and has about twice as much usage share as Jelly Bean.

I suspect Eight adoption will pick up a bit when 8.1 comes out. In a couple more years, it may even manage to attain a higher usage share than XP.

Eight does not, however, appear to be much threat to Seven yet.

You could say the same thing about the authoritarian Islamicist Erdogan too. He and Obama are peas in a pod - that's why he and Obama get along so well, they share the same impulses and goals.

if you think the health care bill is a clusterfuck, just wait until you see the immigration bill being prepared. The Obama Administration is prepared to ignore the breaking of US law so it can get a flood of Democrat-floating immigrants (which the citizenry will have to pay benefits for; those citizens whose jobs have not been supplanted by the very low cost new labour). The Us needs immigration but already has a well established process for allowing this. Having an Administration that is so anti-Constitutional and anti-Rule of Law should wake the citizens up as to the danger of Big Government (no matter whether Democrats or Republicans), but most of the citizens either sleep on, of fight viciously against those who want small Government and limited Government power (eg. Libertarians, Tea Party etc).

Ted Cruz is pretty good, but not so well known. Check him out.