From your first link:<p>"Google’s press office did not respond Friday to an email inquiry about the case, but a lawyer standing by for Petrick said he believes the evidence was all culled from the hard drives and he has no information that Google participated in the investigation."<p>So this shows Google's "evilness" about as much as it shows the evilness of the browser and OS the guy was using.<p>Speaking of which, as the company that writes the OS and Mail.app, doesn't Apple have just as much access to personal communications for its users as Google does?  How do you know that the OS and mail programs don't have back doors that can be used whenever it's required?  You can't even get root on your own iPhone (unless you jailbreak it), so in a very real way they have more control over you own device than you do.  How can you be sure that it's not beaming your GPS coordinates to [insert evil institution here] all the time?  You know when you're sending information to Google, but Apple controls closed-source software running on a location-aware personal device with a microphone on it that people carry around all the time.