According to the Wikipedia page for Carnivore, the carnivore system was targeted (it wasn't really capable of storing much), and it required a court order. I don't think anyone believes that Microsoft or Google are going to refuse to obey court orders to allow the authorities to undertake surveillance: the police have been doing this for decades with phone taps, undercover surveillance etc.
What's substantively different here is: a) this is capturing everyone's data - not a subset where the authorities have had to show a court that they have a reasonable suspicion that justifies some targeted surveillance, and not just metadata, and; b) the companies are on the public record denying that they are taking part Not sure what you mean by Microsoft or Google breaking the law in the past - but things like patent infringements or monopolistic trade practises have come back to bite them before: through damages, fines or reputational loss. I'm sure that a number of people, at the margin, have sworn off using IE because of the way that Microsoft went about using it. The difference here is that many of the companies have staked their future business model on providing a certain service to users and organisations. The capex that these guys are deploying is astounding: Microsoft alone orders around $300m in hardware and services from server vendors every 6 months. IMHO that entire business is at stake here now, if they are caught lying about what they are doing. Cheers Ken -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ben Scott Sent: Friday, 7 June 2013 1:29 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] Now the fertilizer hits the ventilator - or, through a PRISM darkly On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]> wrote: > But we're not talking about small or even medium sized businesses here. > > Google and Microsoft are behemoths, who would stand to lose billions > of dollars a year in revenue ... Like how all those big companies refused to allow access to CARNIVORE? > Every single one of their current and future business customers would leave. Like how everyone left Microsoft and Google when they've been found to be breaking the law/trampling their customers in the past? -- Ben
