A Google engineer named Brandon Downey--"I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google's users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces .... it's just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire chopping down the Party Tree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with half-orcs and whips.” http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/google-engineers-offer-the-nsa-a-giant-f-you-8924604.html

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Google engineers offer the NSA 'a giant F***
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Members of Google's security team blast the NSA in personal blog
posts, saying "F*** these guys"
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intercept data from Google and Y ahoo was shown to some of the search
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giant’s employees they reportedly “exploded in profanity”.
Now a Google engineer named Brandon Downey has made this profanity a
little less second-hand, blasting the NSA in a blog post and comparing his
struggle to defend the company against various aggressors with Frodo’s
struggles in The Lord of the Rings.
“I'm just going to post my thoughts on this. Standard disclaimer: T hey are
This Brit made it
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2. my own thoughts, and not those of my employer,” writes Downey.
“F*** these guys. I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep
Google's users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google
... but organisers say
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“But after spending all that time helping in my tiny way to protect Google - one of the greatest things to arise from the internet -- seeing this, well,
it's just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the
One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire
chopping down the Party T ree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with
half-orcs and whips.”
T his analogy refers to an episode from J.R.R. T olkien's The Lord of the
Rings known as 'T he Scourging of the Shire'. It was omitted from Peter
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Jackson's film adaptations but is sometimes thought to be an allegory for
T olkien's return to an industrialised England after fighting in WWI.
Downey’s comments, spotted by Quartz, were posted to his Google+
account and given the hashtags ‘nsa’ and ‘statesurveillance’. He was
referring to the recent revelation that the US government has secretly
broken secure links between Y ahoo and Google data centers across the
world.
T he programme, codenamed ‘Muscular’, has been described as “unusually
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aggressive” and has contributed to the speedy deterioration of relations
between the US government and the country’s tech giants.
Mike Hearn, a British colleague of Downey’s who also works on Google’s
security team, echoed the feeling of disgust that infrastructure designed
to safeguard against criminal behaviour had been undermined by the UK
Only the lonely
and US governments.
Do writers and
housewives share a
common madness
that comes from their
isolation?
“We designed this system to keep criminals out,” writes Hearn. “T here's
no ambiguity here. T he warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for
appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won
experience.
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“When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the
need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing
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that system is illegal for a good reason.
“I now join [Downey] in issuing a giant F*** Y ou to the people who made
these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it's no different - GCHQ
turns out to be even worse than the NSA.”
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