Uproar following Google’s recent disclosure that email users should have ‘no legitimate expectation of privacy’ begs critics to question—with the rise of big data and the surveillance state—is any of this really a surprise? Does there remain any reasonable expectation of privacy over electronic communication, especially in the United States?

Google’s statement made in a legal brief, revealed Monday by Consumer Watchdog, reads in part:

While critics and media outlets have reacted with shock, others are saying the disclosure is nothing we don’t already know.

The text actually comes from the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland, in which a phone company was accused of wiretapping. That ruling states the court “consistently has held that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.”

That third-party precedent has long been cited by government officials as support for the constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which enabled the National Security Agency to order the release of all Verizon customers’ call information.

Further, Google’s own terms of use reveal that they will turn over users’ personal data in order to “meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable government request.”

Ruminating on why something put forth in the company’s public rules would now create such a furor, PC World’s Jared Newman writes that these procedures “might have seemed okay back when we figured the government needed a warrant to get users’ data, or was at least narrowly restricted in what it could get without one.”