Nat Torkington had an interesting post today where he suggests that by using the new Google Apps - Collaboration Edition you can save yourself a lot of aggravation when traveling anywhere where you might come in contact with the US Border Patrol and the DHS; who have taken up the habit of seizing everything from laptops to cell phones on the chance you are in possession of terrorist type documents or phone numbers.

While this practices is currently facing many court challenges Nat glosses over the fact of how invasive this practices is and how companies are having to react to this latest attempt by the US government to monitor our every move and action. Instead he uses an ambiguous quote from the Washington Post article to give a flyby endorsement for using Google Apps for all you business needs.

All I can say is that Mr. Torkington is being short sighted in his enthusiastic endorsement of web applications that in the end will offer no more protection from prying government eyes than our current use of desktop applications. Sure for the time being this might be a stopgap from the government agencies being able to gain access to your data but to think that this won’t change just proves how much of a dream world we are living in.

Even with DHS or Border Patrol (BP) being able to seize your laptop or make you show them all the information that has been emailed or written in Word moving all that information over to web applications hosted by Google won’t change anything. Just as they can force you to open up Word to view documents they can make you do the same thing with Google Docs. Just as they can make you open up your email client to read your emails they can do the same thing by making you open up your browser with your GMail account displayed for all to read.

The argument that using web apps like Google Docs etc is going to be any protection against prying government eyes is a stupid one to say the least. Some might argue that because they are being hosted by Google you are protected because it is Google that the government would have to go after. If you believe that then you better start giving your head a really big shake; and do it often. Google has never shown that when going up against government agencies like DHS that they will do anything more than require a warrant; which you can be sure the DHS has many rubber stamped ones in their back pocket for such times.

If you are going to argue the merits of using web applications like Google Apps at least have the decency to do it on the value of the software and not mislead people by suggesting that their data is any more secure just because it resides on some server half a country away. To do suggest otherwise is nothing short of irresponsible.

Conversation Tags: Web 2.0, Google Docs, security, Washington Post, O’Reilly Radar