As Andrew Cunningham reported today, Intel and Google are announcing an upcoming onslaught of new Google Chromebooks based on Intel's Haswell architecture processors. The idea of a cloud-tethered notebook that can keep its owner connected over Wi-Fi and broadband all day long—in some cases for less than the price of a shiny new Apple iPhone—is going to be awfully appealing to many.

And without a doubt, no one will be happier than the National Security Agency (NSA) and law enforcement. While Google's cloud computing has provided a platform for the company to grab a big chunk of the low-cost notebook market and upend Microsoft's Windows applecart, the recent NSA leaks by Edward Snowden have put the cloud under... a cloud.

There are some places where this isn't going to necessarily have much impact on Google's market ascension. Google has steamrollered the education market with Google Apps, and the low-cost Chromebook is a natural fit for the classroom. My middle-school-aged daughter now is required to have a Google account for school so she can be linked into her teacher's shared documents; the Chromebook's connection to Google credentials means that she can share a device with classmates, and the school doesn't need IT support to provision accounts on them.

The Chromebook is also an interesting development platform in many ways—the recent functional additions to the Google Apps platform have made it more developer friendly, and collaborative applications live much more happily in a cloud-connected environment than they do in synchronized caches on devices scattered from here to hell and back.

And Chromebooks are designed to allow users to create a lot more information on the device than they might on a tablet. I've been testing a Chromebook Pixel since June's Google I/O event, and the top-end Chromebook has its charms (though its $1,400 price tag is not among them). The Pixel's big and bright touchscreen, built-in 4G wireless, and long battery life make it a somewhat reasonable alternative to tablets for applications heavy on data entry from a keyboard. The new Haswell systems will undoubtedly take many of those advantages and run with them.

But Haswell won't mitigate paranoia over cloud security and compliance, of course. Google has taken many steps forward in easing businesses' concerns over the security of Google Apps over the past few years. But the revelations about the NSA and FBI's PRISM program have added new doubts, particularly outside the US, about the wisdom of putting everything in Google's (or any other cloud provider's) basket.

Furthermore, the Chromebook is everything a government watchman could want—even without Google Apps data and Gmail, it could give those with network monitoring capabilities a way to pinpoint the location of a credential-holder via 4G wireless (thanks, Verizon).

If recent revelations from Brazil are correct, Chromebook plus a government-forged Google certificate equals a man-in-the-middle attack against the SSL security of Google's services—and a way for the government to read all of your e-mails and documents as they pass back and forth through an Internet chokepoint to and from your browser.

None of this is necessarily Google's fault. But it's a weakness of the browser as platform—by pushing nearly all the computing resources for applications, besides presentation, back up into the cloud, the Chromebook model creates a one-stop shop for attackers or observers to inject themselves into your computing world. As the Syrian Electronic Army has proven, it doesn't take the power of the NSA to breach a cloud-based infrastructure—just one bad click on a link and users can give over the keys to their entire digital lives.

Google has addressed some of the security issues around the Chromebook and Google Apps model with its two-factor authentication. But until Google can protect its users' data (physically and legally) at the same level that users can protect themselves by keeping their data encrypted in their own offices and homes, the Chromebook is going to be very popular at Fort Meade—not as something they use, but as something they hope everyone else uses. I don't worry about the NSA reading my daughter's homework (that much), but I've grown increasingly wary about whether they're checking what comes into my work mailbox.

Update: Last night, I received a terse email from a Google representative: "Would be nice if you could give Google an opportunity to respond before making broad allegations. Chromebook is the safest computer one can buy. Security overview here, and earlier this year in a hacking competition no researcher was able to get a full exploit against Chrome OS."

As far as endpoints go, I'd agree that the Chromebook is far less insecure than many other platforms; but the point I'm trying to make has nothing to do with the Chromebook's local security and everything to do with the already well-demonstrated issues around cloud privacy. I could have just as well written an article entitled "Why the NSA loves (fill in name of public cloud service here)," but Chromebook is unique in its tethering to a single set of cloud services over web protocols. When used with the best practices for web security, the Chromebook is secure against most direct attacks on the local hardware and the Chrome browser, but its dependence on a web-based backend where US courts have already ruled there's less of an expectation of privacy is something no amount of end-point security is going to fix.