Guardian had to publish a correction. They also mindlessly copied the press release from Consumer Watchdog and tried to connect the subject to PRISM, which it has nothing to do with (this is about automated Gmail ads).
"Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals."
Your Daily Finance link contains nothing that supports your claim.
Your second link in that paragraph is to a conspiracy site that basically declares anyone who ever is on the same side as Microsoft on any issue to be a Microsoft astroturfer or to have been infiltrated by Microsoft. Among things they claim are under the control of Microsoft: NPR, the Department of Education, the White House, the French government, all major newspapers, Amazon, Yahoo. The page you linked to is up to their usual standards--they base their argument on a Google search showing the CW has criticized Google more than it has criticized Microsoft, and on CW hosting its site on a hosting service that is part of a company that provides services for managing and contacting people.
It's probably best to start with more mainstream sites when researching something, such as the Wikipedia entry for the thing you are researching [1], rather than heading right to the conspiracy sites like Boycott Novell.
I always head to Wikipedia first, but Wikipedia does not always have the complete story. Wikipedia has nothing on FairSearch, and the evidence is pretty solid that Microsoft is behind this group. Nor did it say anything about Florian Mueller being on the dole from Oracle or Microsoft until recently (check the Wikipedia history of his page) when he admitted even, even when we knew for years that this was in fact the case given the sheer volume of articles he writes attacking only Microsoft and Oracle's competitors.
Consumer Watchdog isn't just critical of Google, they are rabidly so to a deranged order. They've got an entire site, http://insidegoogle.com/ dedicated to nothing but 100% Google attacks.
This is the smoking gun modus operandi of astroturf. Does other consumer groups, like Consumers Union/Reports, or Center for Science In the Public Interest maintain sites exclusively dedicated to attacking a single company? They claim their issue is privacy, but if you look on their sight, they attack Google pretty much on everything, for example, they side against consumers and with publishers on Google Books.
Whatever other projects they've got going, it smells fishy. It smells like astroturf.
Guardian had to publish a correction. They also mindlessly copied the press release from Consumer Watchdog and tried to connect the subject to PRISM, which it has nothing to do with (this is about automated Gmail ads).
"Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals."
However, the Consumer Watchdog responsible for the misleading press release is not an advocacy group (there are two of them), it is actually an astroturfer with a heavily anti-Google bias, most likely funded by Microsoft out of a range of such organizations MS runs: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-scr... And some evidence here: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/
Point is, the Guardian make a factual error, and at the same time, copy-pasta'ed an astroturfer.