Which do you trust less with your data, the U.S. government or Google?

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Black Hat Conference, a panel of experts got together to expound on what they see as the privacy and security mess of our times, and they had plenty to say about the U.S. government, cyber war, and Google.

The government really sucks at handling classified data, opined Marcus Ranum, CSO at Tenable Security. He said the vast WikiLeaks dumps of sensitive data from the U.S. government seen over the past few years shows that agencies such as the Department of State need to improve data custodianship. As the panelists veered into the topic of who would you trust less with your data, the U.S. government or Google, ICANN CSO Jeff Moss answered that he feared Google more than the feds. That got Ranum to quip: that’s because Google has a history of getting things done. And it so it went as the others on the panel -- Bruce Schneier, chief security technologist at BT; Adam Shostack, senior program manager at Microsofts Trustworthy Computing Group; and Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, who acted as moderator all got their digs in, too.