The U.S. government does not have “direct access” to user information on Google’s servers, according to CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond.
“First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers,” they wrote in a blog post Friday. “Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.
“Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law,” they added. “Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records.”
However, the officials said that while they recognize the government’s role in protecting citizens by monitoring communications, “the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.”
