It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time.

That aside, let me re-make a point I keep making:

Google had no knowledge of NSA's physical compromise of their data centers. But still, they pushed harder than anyone on the whole Internet for the adoption of modern TLS with forward-secrecy; they are the world's foremost deployers of ephemeral-keyed elliptic curve cryptography and of certificate pinning, both of which ensure not only the security of the traffic running over the network cables into their data centers, but also minimize the impact of a compromised long-term encryption key or the compromise of the CA system by a state actor.

Not only that, but Google launched a high-profile effort to encrypt the communications inside and between their data centers.

I hope a couple years hindsight will put the importance of Adam Langley's work (and that of the rest of his team; he's just the best-known member of that team) at Google into sharper relief.

> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time.

The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons.

Even were a court somewhere to find that this interpretation is incorrect, there are numerous "good faith reliance" doctrines that prevent any prosecution or even civil consequences.

The government outright tortured people for years, and nothing has come of it. No prosecutions. No damages for victims. No cases dismissed for outrageous government conduct. Not even very many harsh words from judges. The only people for whom there were any consequences were the low level regular army people who got in on the torture train without first getting official blessing.

It'll be the same thing here. If some low level employee went out on his own to hack into Google servers, something might come of it. But by all appearances these programs were deliberate, planned, and vetted. In those circumstances the bad actors have long since learned to cover their own asses. There will be no consequences for them.

Why do people put so much effort in comparing tool A to tool B when either of those tools only cover 5% of all the work that goes into any serious application, and the time saved by any advantage tool A has over tool B is pretty much negligible?

I mean cool, so Meteor is maybe better for prototyping. Because that's all we're talking about here, prototypes and ultra-simple websites.

It's always the same story, a shiny new tools that make the first weeks a little smoother, and after that it's business as usually for entire life cycle of the application.

Except of course you now have to deal with a tool that still has years to go before it's really mature and stable, and any advantage you gained in the first few weeks is completely lost.

This has nothing to do with software development, this is just about fashion.

I appreciate the cheekiness of calling it the "Dark Mail Alliance", but from a purely PR perspective, it would make sense to reconsider your name if you are taking the position that encrypted end-to-end email is not solely an interest of those pursuing shady or deviant activities.