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> they are one court order away

The implication being that the courts are corrupt?

If that's the case I think you have way worse things to worry about than "data access", the courts have much greater powers than that.



The scale of it is what is of most interest.

If the court gave a similar order to retrive similar amounts of physical (eg paper) information from your house, and anyone you happened to correspnd with it would be extremely notable and expensive as well as creating dramatic television pictures. Some of that is a deterrant to its abuse.

"Google, fetch" the scale, ease and speed of that is worrying. How is its abuse to be stopped?


Courts may or may not be corrupt, but regardless of that it hasn't historically been very difficult for authorities to find a judge to sign off on a very wide-reaching warrant (like this very case).


Yeah. We voluntarily give info to Google (most of us don't think about it that way, but we do). Google winds up with all this data. In theory, I don't have a problem with the authorities being able to get their hands on it, after getting a warrant. In practice, "getting a warrant" doesn't seem to be as high a bar as it should be.


> The implications being that the courts are corrupt?

You don’t have to be corrupt to be ineffective. Have you been following patent rulings? Or FISA?




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