According to a former Google executive who left in 2004, the thought that the NSA’s data miners could begin ordering them to install a secret pipeline to the agency has many in the company worried. ‘During my time at Google,’ he said, ‘we actually had committee meetings to plan strategy for what to do if the NSA came to us with a demand – and I left kind of in the middle of this. We started making process changes to the way we handled information to make sure that information that the NSA wanted wouldn’t be there. The right thing to do would be to erase everything, but the founders of Google are such information freaks they couldn’t do that. So they wanted to find ways make it so that the NSA couldn’t benefit from [the stored data] but Google could. And by the time I left, they hadn’t located that boundary . . . They were really worried about what would happen if the NSA learned what could be done with information that Google had. And they figured that they only had a couple of years before somebody in the government figured it out.’

- James Bamford, from his book The Shadow Factory (via Quote of the Day mailing list)