Beware the hidden intentions of all sides.

Google (and the Silicon Valley behemoths): Currently know a lot of personal information about the citizenry

The US Government: Wants to know this information

Neither are necessarily deserving of or entitled to this information, so we shouldn't be cheering for either side.

Antitrust is less the issue than personal information / privacy / data tracking regulation. Antitrust enforcement is treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Is there any reason to think the NSA doesn't have access to most of what US corporations have? Either legally through classified programs or illegally through various methods.

It's been confirmed they've had lots of forms of access many times in the past. Seems naive to believe anything would be different today.

You raise a very good point, and I can't even start to guess at the answer or implications.

I think any data the NSA has would be stringently guarded and only used for high-profile / high-impact cases. If the NSA was constantly feeding data to other agencies about trivialities, then it would raise red flags about where "all this incriminating evidence" came from.

Cases involving StingRay interceptions have been dropped so as to protect the details of such interceptions.

There's also the relationship between the agency and the Government to consider. The CIA don't seem to get along very well with various members of the US Government, and with "good" members such as Ron Wyden, if the NSA was feeding ill-gotten data to the US Govt, then someone like him would probably raise some kind of stink.

This doesn't answer the fundamental question of whether the NSA has this data, it's more about the potential mitigation of the likelihood of the data being actually used against someone.

Much like we don't know where the line is on the potential for Huawei kit to be a threat to national security.

Something. Not nothing.

Edited to add: There's also the very likely situation where Government policy / regulation is put in place to cover all parties, and the NSA ignores this anyway because they're above the law. Everyone else must play by the rules, the US Govt looks to be doing the right thing.

(this isn't a bitter statement, merely that I think this is how things actually work, whether for the US or any other country; realpolitik)

> I think any data the NSA has would be stringently guarded and only used for high-profile

Didn't Snowden attest in an interview to NSA officers using webcam intercepts to get their rocks off?

This is just a dog whistle for the political claim that search results, curated content, or algorithmic feeds are "biased" against a particular viewpoint of the world that they would prefer. Their intent is to use enforcement and investigative powers to make that case publicly and intimidate. The worst case, in their view, is to raise uncertainty about information sources; or, in the best case, to coerce more favorable rankings for their favored information sources. It's a furtherance of our state of domestic information warfare, while they remain in power.

Barr is notably for a surveillance state, more or less. Relying on a pick of Trump's to solve anything in the Valley is a recipe for disaster.

Do you know of a WH official that was ever against the surveillance state?

And why does trump picking him make him automatically a disaster?

I feel like this is being completely dismissive of any kind of progress that could be made because orange man is bad.

I think the heuristic is whether someone accepts a nomination from trump.

> And why does trump picking him make him automatically a disaster?

Because President Trump doesn't have a great record in picking nor retaining people.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-...

Pretty much this, yeah. Just because we're on HN doesn't mean reality (GOP rot) goes out the window.