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Comment by devx | Hacker News Reader

> "I wonder: what if a substantial number of Americans started using strong crypto on a routine basis?"

That may happen anyway, in time, if this situation is not fixed, but it could happen so much faster if companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook (ok, I know I'm really pushing with this one) who have services used by over a billion people would offer very secure end-to-end communications platform, by default, and in a very transparent way (being able to check for sneaky backdoors pre-encryption, or anything like that).

They don't even have to do it for everything, especially the parts which are meant to be more public anyway, but there's absolutely no reason why IM's couldn't be completely private - from everyone and anyone, including the companies themselves.

So what are you waiting for Google, Microsoft and Facebook (and others, too)?

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You understand that any platform offered by any company with substantial presence in the US would have full access to any data provided to NSA and law enforcement agencies, in most cases under gag order preventing them from disclosing that fact? It can not be any other way - US government has full jurisdiction in the US, and if US law says US citizens can not have privacy from the government and have their data not be accessible by the government - and that is what current interpretation of the law seems to be - then any provider on the US soil, including Google, Microsoft and Facebook - has no other option but to comply with the law?

It'd be interesting if US, Russian, and Chinese entrepreneurs got together and agreed to build start-ups for one-another's citizens, where the US brand was run from Russia, the Russian one from China, etc. Now that'd get some people on terrorist watch-lists.

I think the temptation would be too great for the respective governments to resist, and given that surveillance against foreigners would not even cause a significant public backlash, those would be compromised even quicker. Right now the whole story blew up because NSA is spying on Americans. If Snowden revealed that NSA is mass-collecting information on Chinese or Russians, the only response would be "keep up the good work, guys!".

Well, sure, it decreases the amount of "security by angry-mob-if-you-screw-up" you get, but it increases the amount of "security by inability to legally compel keys from the companies involved." I'm not sure whether that's positive- or negative-sum, actually.

No IMs definitely can't be kept private from the companies themselves because those companies make their money by knowing what it's users talk about.

This is part of why I never trusted GMail from the beginning. (But I'm still stuck with it.)

They can already use the e-mails. Why do they have to use the chat conversations, too?

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