Comment by adventured
12 years ago
Google will never do it, but they should drown the NSA in bullshit data. So much so it literally chokes the NSA's ability to spy on Google's services.
Google is one of the few companies that could pull it off. They have $56 billion in cash and nothing to do with it apparently. They generate $12 billion in profit annually and growing.
They have more financial resources, computing power, and brain power than the NSA does, and they're one of the few companies on earth that can say that (the only?).
A billion a year thrown at choking the NSA with a flood of data, I'd argue, would work extraordinarily well.
The NSA has a substantial budget (but how much spare budget?), but I don't believe they could afford the processing and storage costs that can be generated from a billion dollar per year effort of bogus data spewing (particularly if Google matches it with a dramatic effort put toward encryption R&D to multiply the cost the NSA suffers significantly more than just basic processing & storage costs).
The NSA's grand new data center in Utah cost billions and will have taken years to build. Google could probably force them to attempt to build a new one every single year forever, particularly given how bloated every effort by the government is and easy Google could generate 'infinite' volumes of data. Google should pro-actively help Yahoo, Facebook and others out in teaming up to drown the NSA.
The biggest threat to Google is the NSA. Google should act accordingly. Just as they would react with financial investments to any other competitive threat.
A better use of all that money would be to play the lobbying game the enemies of freedom so effectively play.
This is the the thing I completely fail to understand. If all these huge tech firms with all this cash really care about privacy, people, US reputation, etc, then why are they not pouring their money in to politics like, say, the weapons manufacturers do? Why aren't they "buying" politicians?
I think a more sensible use of the money would be to 'fix' the ability to buy whatever legislation you want. Its really not a democracy any more when those wealthy enough can buy whatever legislation they want.
Unfortunately I think a real sense of democracy is long gone. We are left having the play the only game left in town. Buy your influence then, influence.
The NSA could, however, get a law passed for like $1M that makes this practice illegal, if it isn't already.
The portion of google's operation that NSA is tapping is already tiny. This article claims they got 181 million "records" of all kinds in a month. That's nothing! Google claims that gmail has half a billion active accounts. You think each of those active accounts only sends and receives one mail every other month? of course not.
The NSA is clearly already drowning, or being selective about what they are getting.