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What is confusing to me about this idea is that it would seem as if Google would then only be passing over past data for the requested account.

Since FISA is all about active surveillance and wiretaps (of phones when it was written in 1978), wouldn't the government also want a way to watch activities in online accounts in realtime?

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It's worth looking into FISA (and the DOJ interpretations of it) to see if the court can approve requests for user credentials/tokens. This would give intelligence officers more continuous access to user data, though they would still be legally limited to the time period approved by the court.

With a frequent enough update cycle there's no reason it can't be close to real time. The government's systems could then use inotify or some other filesystem watcher to automatically reload the page when new data comes in over SFTP.

If this is the case, then Google's assertion that it's just SFTP seems a bit meaningless.

I don't see why technical accuracy would ever be meaningless. I thought we were better than that. If we're smart enough to understand the technical details then we should be smart enough to understand the further implications of those details without having to be lied to by journalists.

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