I've seen this attitude several times now and I simply do not understand it.
This is not "conspiracy". It would be unfair in the way you state if there was no evidence, and then these companies' denials was taken as evidence that they participated.
But that's not the situation. What we have is the US government saying (albeit unwillingly) that these companies are involved. It's not "conspiracy" to think that they are, in fact, involved, it's just obvious.
No, there is probably nothing these companies can say that will not look suspicious. That's not being unreasonable, that's simply looking at the evidence and realizing that the evidence against these companies outweighs their statements of denial.
We're just short of finding a guy with a bloody axe standing over the still-bleeding corpse of his victim, and you're complaining that nothing the murderer can say will clear his name. Well, yes.
> But that's not the situation. What we have is the US government saying (albeit unwillingly) that these companies are involved. It's not "conspiracy" to think that they are, in fact, involved, it's just obvious.
Hmmm...it's obvious, but only in the way that circular logic is obvious to the one in the circle...Your claim that the U.S. government is saying that these companies are involved is not what I've seen (though I admit I may not have read every article on this). What the U.S. government has said is:
1) The executive branch is allowed to conduct legislatively and judicially approved surveillance and some of this surveillance is in coordination with communication companies.
2) The recent reporting on the NSA has contained several inaccuracies
I haven't seen any tacit admission of PRISM. If you want to argue that the president admitted to the program by not outright denying it (in this press conference, for example: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/07/statem...)...well, that again is a questionable standard of judgment, and one that is vulnerable to false positives.
You don't have a smoking gun here. You have, so far, 4 PowerPoint slides of a heavily-redacted 41-slide presentation. You have the opinion of the career intelligence officer who leaked those slides. And you have the two strongly worded denials of Google and Facebook. Note: this does not mean that the companies aren't just outright lying, which is always still a possibility. But I'm saying, from what we know so far, what has been actually said is kind of what I would expect them to say if they were telling the truth (admittedly, I may not have a very creative mind).
They've said what you'd expect if they were telling the truth, sure. They've also said what you'd expect if they were lying. In other words, these statements provide no information. Given that, and the other evidence, it's reasonable to think that they are lying.
First off, the generator is awesome!
Second, (and i cannot remember who famously said this, sorry) the best description of any system is its results...
What does it matter whether they knew or did not know? The end result is the same, they are going to lose my (future) data!
This is not "conspiracy". It would be unfair in the way you state if there was no evidence, and then these companies' denials was taken as evidence that they participated.
But that's not the situation. What we have is the US government saying (albeit unwillingly) that these companies are involved. It's not "conspiracy" to think that they are, in fact, involved, it's just obvious.
No, there is probably nothing these companies can say that will not look suspicious. That's not being unreasonable, that's simply looking at the evidence and realizing that the evidence against these companies outweighs their statements of denial.
We're just short of finding a guy with a bloody axe standing over the still-bleeding corpse of his victim, and you're complaining that nothing the murderer can say will clear his name. Well, yes.