The US government is destroying one of the few bright spots in the American economy with its out of control military. It is unconscionable. And the sad thing is it has been enabled by the betrayal by many of the web 2.0 giants, Facebook, Google etc. Google especially is sad to see since they were willing to forgo the Chinese market on principle, but then decided that taking on the authoritarian US government was too lucrative for principle to be involved. If Google had done what Lavabit just did we would be living in a freer country today.
Agreed, these US Gov contractors and agencies systematically destroying our industry and our prospects.
As a community, let's shun and shame all those who continue work for those agencies (NSA/CIA/FBI/DIA/DEA) both directly and as contractors from this date forward. If you didn't quite in August 2013, we don't want to hire you. If you quite now in disgust, we should view that in a positive light. If you or your company stand up to the US Gov, that should view that in a VERY positive light and we should be looking to hire them.
Let's shun and shame FB, Google, et all as collaborators. Let's make it a point to avoid google app engine and other Google services.
It would be one thing if Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other big firms were selling out their customers' privacy for money. They do it all of the time for advertising. I wouldn't like that, but it would be somewhat understandable that a big uncaring firm would look at their bottom line as the only determining factor. But are they making more money by being the government's snitch?
The really weird thing here is that what's going on isn't even in these companies' self-interest because they're going to make people and businesses not trust online storage of their data in any way. So all of these cloud services, all of these online storage services, anything that impacts peoples' privacy in any way is going to be put at risk of customers choosing other options for managing their data.
Go is open source so anyone is free to inspect it for backdoors. I would be very surprised if Google, on behalf of the NSA, tried to sneak anything in like that. It would also be fairly obvious if it used the underlying OS's networking to send info back.
Obviously you're being somewhat facetious. If you're good/confident enough to write your own crypto, go seems fine as it's open source so you can inspect it. I don't trust myself to write my own crypt for important things, so obviously I would not use Golang for that and I would pause before using the Golang crypto module, but that's probably a bit paranoid. In general, I would probably use Golang on projects. I use Angular.s and Python and those have been funded in ways by Google.
Things like Google App Engine/Data store are an issue b/c your backend is Google's backend...fundamentally the same issue Gmail faces. If the NSA/FBI/DEA/TSA mistakenly fingers one of my customers as a drug dealer or "terrorist" or thinks they are associated with a drug dealer/whistleblower/"terrorist", google will hand over all my apps data.
Then again, you hear about Microsoft or Sun/Oracle passing notes to the NSA about insecurities in the OS or JVM so that they can go about their stealthy ways. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened with Go. But good point, it's open source.
Good point about the dependencies. If it was something that someone's life depended on, especially mine, I'd do the encryption operations in a vetted C/C++ library due to possible dependency issue in GOLANG. I just don't know enough about GO or even encryption for that matter.
I can imagine what would happen to Google if, through some dark miracle, their leadership decided to do this.
Most of their top engineers live in America. So do the leaders, but ignore them, we've already decided they want this. The employees don't, though: There are eleven thousand people, there, who'll need to be relocated to - where? Europe, probably Ireland, where many of them have never been.
Certainly not where they have roots, or where their family is.
Google has deep pockets. They can afford to pay massive relocation bonuses, and they'll have to do so. Still, this is eleven thousand people; we're probably talking about a billion plus, just to get a reasonable number of them to follow. After all, most of these engineers would be perfectly capable of finding work at a different company.
Okay, so they've done that. They lost a lot of good people; probably a lot of their best people, the ones that care least about money. Still, they're now in Europe.
Now what?
Most of their infrastructure is still in the US. Compute clusters, god only knows how many. Storage clusters. User data, placed in the US under safe harbor provisions because an attempt at keeping it in Europe is unfeasible given the rather diverse tapestry of privacy laws here.
They'll need to move it all to Europe. They'll need to figure out a place to put it, and they'll need to pay billions - quite a few - to rebuild and expand their infrastructure here.
By the time this is all done, they'll have new problems. Realistically, they'll go bankrupt somewhere in the middle. And that's not mentioning possible reactions from the US government.
It would be great if leaving the US was an option, but it really.. just isn't.
Would you want to be the one who makes that stand against them? You can be guaranteed that you are from that day onwards a marked man. Everything you do, everywhere you go, and every person you talk to will be monitored. They will look for the tiniest chin in your armour, and once shown they will hang you out to dry. This explains why companies like Google and Yahoo had little choice but to comply. It might also explain why Obama so drastically changed hs beliefs.
If Google et al are facing major potential economic loss due to a widespread lack of confidence in the security of their data, they had better come up with a plan to combat that loss.
The actions of Lavabit actually caused me to cancel my account with Google Play All Access today (proof: http://i.imgur.com/KbmaBnS.png, if anyone cares), that I've had since day one.
It's not that I didn't know that Google was ok with the spying before, but seeing the difference between the reaction of Lavabit, to the non-reaction from Google -- well THAT gave me the final push to stop doing business with the company.
I really like Google's products. I really like All Access, but I don't think I'll be supporting the company financially anymore.
It probably won't matter much, but it's still something.
Lavabit was a tiny private operation. If you think that a publicly traded multi billion dollar company with millions of users and customers can just shut down to avoid complying with government requests then you are a deluded moron.
I never suggested that it was feasible for Google to shut down, but that doesn't mean that I have to just accept what they are complicit in. I no longer choose to do business with them. That hardly makes me a deluded moron.
The burden isn't on Google (I'm not sure why you are singling out Google) their hands are tied from a legal and practical standpoints.
They receive warrants and subpoenas with which they have to comply to keep doing business, if you don't care for that blame the politician and the legal system, focusing on Google is not only missing the point, it's unfair
If you are seriously suggesting that abandoning the US market is a realistic option, especially for a multibillion dollar corporation, then you are (and I'm not using this word lightly) an idiot.
Not to mention that there is no US equivalent to the rampant human rights violations and censorship in China.
I'd say that's exactly what they want everyone to think.
Of course we see more violations in china, but who's to say you don't have 10 times more of that from the US?
Just because they don't do it to US citizens (in most cases) it doesn't mean they don't do it.
Believing the other side is worse just cause you "see" more of that stuff, ends up being just blissful ignorance. Every party has it's faults and I have no doubt in my mind that the US has the most.
But we shouldn't worry... that's all to "protect the american citizens from terrorism" :D
There are plenty of human rights violations that the US commits as a matter of policy, due to its "War on Terror" - drone strikes and Guantanamo Bay are two major ones.
