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Comment by kylec

12 years ago

Google may have better security, but they're also a much, much larger target. Wiretapping Google gives you access to the private data of Google's millions and millions of users, whereas gaining access to my network gets you access to… me. As long as there's a non-trivial fixed cost to attacking a host or a network, there's an advantage to hosting your own data.

While it's possible that the NSA has a system to automatically detect and wiretap hosts and private networks connected to the internet, it seems unlikely to not have been detected so far. I've taken to assuming that every packet send and received from my servers is being monitored, but that, barring specific interest in me by the NSA, the servers themselves are reasonably private.