Judge orders Google to comply with FBI's secret NSL demands
The sad thing here is that there is a real war on terror, no matter what you hear. There are actual violent-minded individuals that the state has an obligation to track and protect us from.But the powers granted to the state to do this are humongously broad. It's ludicrous to have the FBI be able to write letters and retrieve any of your online activity it wants -- all without you knowing about it. The IRS has even more power. It can pull your records without the NSLs. All you have to be is "interesting" to them. (Don't know if they've exercised this power yet, but it's coming)So when corporations like Google complain, out trots the assistant director to give classified testimony about all these evil folks in the world. Yes, sure. But one doesn't justify the other. I'm really happy somebody is doing something about bad guys right now. What I worry about is a few years down the road when all of this security state nonsense is used for political reasons.Some people think you have to be afraid of the government knowing too much about you. Some people think you have to be afraid of corporations knowing too much about you. Some people worry that we can easily find out too much about just about anybody (facial recognition Google glass tied back to something like Spokeo isn't far off). But it's not an either-or choice. All of these factors work together, as we see in this case.This is not going to end well.