How do you think they compare to defense contractors, et al. in terms of secret initiatives, black box projects, whatever?
Asking due to Assange-Schmidt transcript and the Assange NYT op-ed, but might prefer answers which avoid Assange and focus on Google (or MS or whoever).
You should probably assume that with any large corporation you are privy to about 0.01% of what goes on there.
(Of course, that doesn't mean that the remaining 99.99% is evil. Actually, your assumptions about what's going on with stuff that you don't know about says a lot about yourself as a person.)
google is pretty good about this. if you're a googler, you'll find out about most of the other things going on. there were a few exceptions during my time there (Android, Wave), but the teams involved always came clean to Googlers before they told the world. The culture is definitely very open.
They'll give the government whatever they like, just like all the other mentioned companies. Collecting more data is pretty much their business goal, so they're pretty well aligned already. I doubt they do anything special exclusively to help the NSA though, if the data's useful they'd be collecting it for themselves anyway.
