The beauty of corporations is that they are still accountable to a much greater degree than than the NSA. Those who run Google have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. Up until a few months ago this always meant to many that if there was anything fishy going on at Google that they would quickly resolve the problem by firing the individuals guilty of any transgression and quickly instituting security policies to make sure something like that doesn't happen again. After all, individuals can mount class action suits, as can shareholders and the FTC or other some other regulator can come down on them.

The problem with what we discovered a few months ago is that the government can use fiduciary duty of the officers of these companies against the companies and they can do so in a way that guarantees that the executives won't talk about the abuse. They made demands for access and every corporation in the world knows that when push comes to shove, you don't want to piss off any organization that can unleash the IRS on your bookkeeping. And if someone does push back, its possible that there were additional threats of jail time for obstructing justice or contempt of court. Add to that the ability to gag anyone with an NSL and you have a situation that is wide open to abuse.

Unlike corporations, the people don't really have real recourse for transgressions of the NSA, CIA or LEO in general when it involves secrets that we are not privileged to, especially not any recourse within the capabilities of the common man (unless you are a common man within those institutions and you're willing to give up everything to whistleblow). Most attempts to sue get thrown out on state secrets grounds. All we have left is the ability to vote, but its pretty clear from some of the facts that that is unlikely to make any difference for most voters since the only people who knew what was going on were on the intelligence committees and even then both the ICs in both houses and the FISA court have admitted that they don't have any real oversight.

Facing this reality, I'm not entirely surprised people like pj at groklaw and ll at lavabit are checking out.

My hope would be that at least corporations are not lemmings.

For a non-US company that does anything remotely sensitive or competitive on an international level, it's simply insane to use, say, Google's cloud services.

I don't know to what extent Google depends on foreign corporate clients -- but I'd be surprised if this wasn't something they were very seriously concerned about.

(And the recent revelations about the NSA are really just the icing on the cake. If there is high demand for some confidential data, it's likely that there will be supply.)