One thing I've seen on HN and elsewhere is the accusation, and I'm not saying you said this, that goes something like this: "Of course Larry and Mark are lying! They'd be required to lie because of <handwave> government secretsauce."

This naturally extremely well-written article demonstrates that AT&T and Verizon never actually lied. And that AT&T and Verizon acted in basically the opposite way that the Internet companies are today. So it casts doubt on the <handwave> forced-to-lie-secretsauce allegations.

An update to the story includes some more detail on AT&T's participation.

One other thing I saw is the claim that the denials were not evidence because it would be denied either way. Which is in complete contradiction to Bayesian statistics (denial probability is ~100% if they aren't surveilling us, and <100% if they are, see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o..., specifically the discussion of the supposed "5th column").

1. "Presumably, if someone asks if you've ever been served a NSL, you're supposed to lie and say "no.""

This is an awful large presumption. You could simply say nothing, and not answer.

2. the only courts to ever confront the NSL's compelled silence have ruled it unconstitutional.

There are zero courts that have ever okay'd this.

3. The "not your lawyer" part is now explicitly wrong, as the law now states (and has since 2006), "shall disclose to any person (other than those to whom such disclosure is necessary to comply with the request or an attorney to obtain legal advice or legal assistance with respect to the request)".

4. Judicial review of any NSL may now be had (again, since Mar 9, 2006), in a normal district court. See "18 USC § 3511 - Judicial review of requests for information"

There are plenty of reasons to generate large amounts of righteous indignation about NSL's, but it would be nice if you actually got the law right in the hyperbole.

Thanks for the correction, I'm glad to hear the law was modified. I went back to the story in Wired and I see they did make note of the change to the law.

First, by citing NSLs, you're unintentionally proving the point of the article. Google recently began disclosing how many NSLs it received. NSLs do not require the recipient to lie.

Second, two courts have ruled that NSL gag orders are unconstitutional (this is before the Ninth Circuit now with a summer briefing schedule). The <secretsauce> lie order you speculate, with any evidence, exists would be extra doubleplusungood unconstitutional.

(BTW, I was the first to disclose less than two weeks ago that Google is litigating two different NSL cases. I daresay I'm familiar with the topic...)

> Facebook, Google, etc stand to loose a lot if the allegations are true or are believed to be.

Do they? If they had come out and said "yes, the Government has <x, y, z> access because as US companies we are required to comply with their requests", how many people (outside of HN readers) would do anything about it? I'm not saying people wouldn't care, and I'd hope (and do hope, with the current situation) that the reaction would cause changes, I just don't see those changes being "let's move away from Google to... some other company that offers comparable services and that can't be forced by governments to reveal data".

This is sad but probably true.