Google Asks Federal Judge To Challenge National Security Letters 57
mk1004 writes "From Bloomberg and the Washington Post come reports that Google is petitioning a federal court to resist compliance with a national security letter from the FBI. This comes two weeks after the U.S. District Judge in San Francisco ruled that NSLs are unconstitutional because they 'violate the First Amendment and separation of powers principles.' Google filed a petition to 'set aside the legal process,' citing a provision that allows judges to modify or deny NSLs that are 'unreasonable, oppressive, or otherwise unlawful.' EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman was quoted as saying, 'the people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google. So far no one has really stood up for their users.'"
Re:Don't be evil (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't be evil (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't mind that, actually.
The problem with the government is that they want to snoop, spy and record every facet of your life while simultaneously BEING one of the bullies and not really protecting you from the other ones.
If Google does what you say, well, that's like government but done right. I'm not sure that'd be a bad thing.
Good for Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Google gets a lot of hate and are often put into the same category as other big corporations, but they do a lot of work on keeping the web free and "open", and this:
puts them in a league apart from the others, even though they aren't perfect.
I do dread the day they become "evil" like everyone else though; I expect it's just a matter of time.
But so far, despite their mis-steps and their massive collection of users' data, they remain sui generis.
Support the EFF! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: National Security Letter (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like a search warrant.
But it only requires a "government official" that is "investigating" national security.
And they don't need a judge to sign...
And the recipient can't announce they GOT ONE or any details...
And it can't be challenged in court (cause you can't talk about it)...
Although they are "reviewed" once a year per agency by some secret list of judges, somewhere... But no checks and balances are included in the law if the judges didn't like the results.
Re:Don't be evil (Score:4, Interesting)
Vista was not bad compared to pretty much any OS. The only people who think it was are people who have never even used it and just swallowed the negative hype of the media and other people who had never used it.
I used it. I had it on an OEM machine and that wasn't bad. I tested it at my workplace on a few machines and it burned us. Drivers had issues, upgrades were spotty at best, the addition of IPv6 on by default was an unpleasant surprise that our network didn't much care for, user account control was a constant nuisance for admin machines (less so, but still a relevant problem for users)... Essentially Vista was a warning label for all the things you had to do in order to prep for Windows 7. We did our prep work and Windows 7 wasn't so bad. But the burn on Vista meant that we didn't start our Windows 7 migration until our backs were against the wall on XP end of life.
Windows 8 is the best version of Windows to come out. Aside from the start menu (which is debatable), it's much improved over Vista/7.
Windows 8 is the best under the hood. Unfortunately Microsoft shit all over the interface in an attempt to leverage their market dominance on PC's to take over the phone/tablet market with a "unified interface". So yeah, it's basically a Ferrari with a Pinto chassis. It looks like we'll be running Windows 7 until it goes end of life now, and hope that Windows 9 doesn't look like such an abomination. And if we have to retrain 1000+ users on how to get to their programs so they can do actual work then maybe it'll be time at that point to examine replatforming options.