Sorry, I should have been more explicit. Of course all US companies comply with US court orders.
The controversial new revelation re: PRISM, via Snowden, was that NSA was also snarfing everything they could including unencrypted comms over frame relay/etc networks comprising, e.g., Google's internal inter-site networks.
To which all mentioned companies said "we were not aware of this, we never authorized a backdoor for LE at any level, this is a breach of trust and probably not legal, and now we'll encrypt everything between our internal systems too".
If they can ask whatever they want (they had secret courts that could provide any legal request), they have a massive data acquisition apparatus, they had many backdoors they actively used, and big companies complied while being silenced by a gag order, assuming they have direct backdoors provided officially today that we don't know about, and that companies with proprietary systems we can't check can't talk about, is just common sense at this point.
Why would you give them the benefit of the doubt when the 2 last decades of track record have given you all the reason not to, and that the next step is the logical conclusion?
Lions kill gazelles. But not this specific gazelle because I like this one?
But anyway, the point is moot, they don't even need to for this particular debate. They already have a lot. The UK therefor not matching them exactly is just them using a slightly parallel road for the same result.
It's a terrible thing either way for us. But I get the logic for them.
Oh, I don't trust any of the actors. But I trust the encryption math.
If the argument is that the encryption is compromised by weak factors or key escrow etc, then that is a really interesting conversation, on which I'd like to hear more informed opinions.
But if all we can do is speculate, my trust remains in the mathematics.
The controversial new revelation re: PRISM, via Snowden, was that NSA was also snarfing everything they could including unencrypted comms over frame relay/etc networks comprising, e.g., Google's internal inter-site networks.
To which all mentioned companies said "we were not aware of this, we never authorized a backdoor for LE at any level, this is a breach of trust and probably not legal, and now we'll encrypt everything between our internal systems too".