alt Hacker NewsMy uninformed opinion of it all is that certain companies have been blessed or anointed by the intelligence agencies for many decades and they've been acting on their behalf every since. Google, Apple, Amazon, Reddit, Microsoft, Elon's stuff, the Telcos and so on. Backdoors, direct access and so on. Same for all the major crypto on/off ramps.
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It's not uninformed, you're just working with what you've got. Snowden credibly condemned American tech businesses as being conjoined at the hip with the NSA, without exposing all of the blackmail material that the fed had on them. It's overwhelmingly likely that their relationship has only deepened, we've seen no evidence that FAANG is serious about detaching itself from US influence.
10 years ago you'd probably hear some spiel about Bitlocker being "safe enough", or the iPhone's many virtues as a private enclave. Fast-forward to today, and it's hard to see American tech as benign.
Once you start to have a large influence on the world, people come knocking.