Given the complicity of most of these companies, there is quite a bit of hypocrisy involved in their call to curtail the NSA’s surveillance powers. Still, I welcome their help in reining in the intelligence community.
The giants of the tech industry are uniting to wage a campaign for sweeping reforms to the National Security Agency.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, LinkedIn and AOL are setting aside their business rivalries to demand that Congress and President Obama scale back the government’s voracious surveillance.
“[T]his summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide,” the companies wrote in an open letter to Obama and members of Congress, appearing in a national print ad Monday.
“The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. … It’s time for change.”
The companies are demanding reforms above and beyond legislation in front of Congress that would curb the NSA’s powers.
It obviously is quite damaging to American computer/software/telecommunications companies when the global consumer has no confidence in those companies’ ability to protect their private information. Part of the deal that the NSA made with these companies was that their role would be hidden and denied. Edward Snowden blew up that agreement, and now there is a commercial necessity to restore consumer confidence.
I would prefer to live in a world where the 4th Amendment is respected even in the absence of a commercial necessity, but I will take what I can get.
Apple’s actually pretty good – it doesn’t store location information from iPhones, for instance, so there’s nothing for the government to get. Apple also posted a report recently on government surveillance requests, which is more transparency than you get from most companies. (Microsoft has done the same, I believe.)
The revelations of the forced(?) collaboration of these corporations with NSA have hurt their international revenues or threaten to. There is the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s intellectual property provisions coming down the track, and not all of these companies benefit from them. In fact, pharmaceuticals, motion picture, and recording industry corporations benefit most from them.
And the gag orders on them do not permit them to tell the public exactly what their relationship to NSA is.
That said, their end user licensing agreements and legal pronouncements should come under scrutiny as well.
Well we can hope that the TPP will fail. I certainly do.
As much pandering baggage for US corporate interests as that negotiation seems to have, it appears it might collapse of its own weight before it reaches Congress. But denying fast-track authority needs to be a backstop for progressives.
Forget it. Until we have an electorate that doesn’t panic whenever a terrorist pulls off a successful attack, we’re going to be stuck with this surveillance. Imagine the right wing reaction after the Boston Marathon bombing had Obama rolled back NSA surveillance in 2009. QED.
The electorate reflects the attitude of the authorities. The authorities in Boston shut down a major US city in order to track two people. That was likely a test of public acquiescence to martial law, but helped drive the terrorist narrative (and the it was a Muslim narrative) even before the suspects were captured.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is alive and well in the US.
The REAL “WW III” Begins. William Gibson’s Dystopia Is At Hand.
Read it.
Long story short? Sure. The tech giants think that they can win, and I think that they are right. Big Gov is totally incompetent. Big Tech isn’t. It’s not a shooting war…Big Gov would shoot itself in the foot if it took them down because the whole economy would collapse. So who has the real power now?
Hmmmm…lemme see…
Later…
AG
P.S. Once again…Big Gov is totally incompetent. Need even more proof? Have you seen this latest crock of NSA shit yet?
I repeat:
And:
Yeah.
They would if they had any brains.
But then if they really had any brains, they’d be working for Google. There has been a brain drain going on for quite some time now, from Big Gov to Big Tech. It’s now reached a point where Big Gov…with the best of intentions, possibly…cannot tie its own digital shoelaces because it can only afford semi-moronic workers.
This whole NSA/CIA “World of Warcraft” thing is just another Big Gov overtime hustle. Somebody comes up with a harebrained idea and/or by divine accident something actually works and then it is RUSH TO OVERTIME!!! HOTTEST THING EVER!!! LETS HIRE SOME MORE SPOOKTECHS!!!
Big Gov in a nutshell.
Snowden for Person Of The Year!!! Without the Wikileaks thing, we’d be in worse trouble. Bet on it.
P.P.S, Speaking of overtime hustles…remember that MetroNorth railroad accident last week? It was less than a mile up a set of hills from my apartment. Every available police car, emergency vehicle and fire engine raced up the hill that morning in front of my place, and deservedly so. But there were easily 20 police cars “overtiming” on my street every night…until dawn… for days after there was no more emergency to be policed. I could hear them hoo-hawing throughout the night. Having a great time making double salary. That kind of bullshit up and down the societal line is one reason that we are so broke now.
AG is right about the “brain drain”. I’ve seen it often. Young, idealistic, smart …. learn their job, get slapped around by time serving middle management and end up in private industry. Until they are drained dry and end up back in gov’t -> as time serving middle management.
Cynical managers create cynical workers.
The inevitable product of the doctrine of the “divine right of bosses”.
And the cynical workers who are really good at cynicism become the time-serving middle managers who serve until they are canned at age 49. Or let go in a downturn. To allow a younger and more cynical manager to take their place.
The cynical workers that don’t make manager or have not hankering for that kind of responsibility. They’re the ones who are overtiming.
And the NSA workers. They convinced their bosses that playing multi-user internet video games was a part of their surveillance mission. Pretty neat trick, eh.
Snowden absolutely hero of the goddamn year.
But I am betting the CIA thing is some analysts just wanting to play WoW while at work and getting paid for it and figuring out a way to sell it to idiot higher ups.
How much in-house tech work does the NSA perform. How much is done by private contractors?
That’s secret!!!
It’s all secret.
That’s why it’s called “Security.”
AG
This sacred belief in what these Internet Giants tell them is … infantile. It’s just embarrassing, it really is. Google, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft? All full of shit.
Basically, it’s a blatant example of the state-corporate nexus talking shit, again, but speaking through the mouth of the Internet Giants, on the clear assumption that `Government sources’ aren’t quite so cuddly and media friendly.
They got caught in bed with the NSA, now they’re in damage control to change some window dressing while the security enterprise rolls on. Bet on that.
Yes. Of course. It’s always about the money. My point is that this is a new paradigm in the modern Big Gov/Big Corps hustle system. Big Corps owns Big Gov but does not fight it openly. All the negotiations are done under the table using various forms of lobbying, political “donations” and the revolving doors of government office/corporate office/think tank office/academic office etc. Plus of course some good, old-fashioned bribery when necessary. But now the Big Corps tech guys have drawn a line in the sand.
This is revolutionary!!! An entirely new development. The gloves are off and the old Marquis of Queensbury rules are thrown out in favor of a more MMA style of competition.
Watch.
The feds will fold.
Watch.
It’s already happening. Obama is jerking around like the political marionette he has allowed himself to become in an effort to…once again (sigh)…parse all of the factors weighing on him in this situation into some middle ground. He’s caught between a rock and a new hard place this time…between the security apparatus about which he and his assistants have lied over and over and over again and this new problem. The security state knows where all of the bodies are buried. Imagine what would happen if they leaked what they undoubtedly know regarding the dirty work of international diplomacy, for example. It would make Snowden’s revelations look like a comic book. The new guys are the people who build the security weapons, really. They have unlimited resources in that department and could probably out-NSA the NSA within a few months of effort.
Hmmmmm…
Betcha he is.
I am actually sorry for him. He’s in way over his head now. Too bad. He coulda been a contender. Now he’s just another contractor. So it goes.
AG
Viewed from a European perspective, the internet seems to be splitting in two. Everyone assumes all traffic through the USA or USA companies is monitored, and not just for terrorist security reasons, but for commercial espionage as well. So all non-USA corporates are switching to non- US providers and encrypted email and insisting that no traffic may be routed through the USA at any time.
Thus we are now developing a US internet and a Rest of the World internet. US global corporate leaders will no longer be trusted and will be replaced by non-US providers. All US hardware will be assumed to e bugged and replaced by non-US hardware. The commercial damage to the US will be immense.
If you can bug Merkel, we must assume you will bug anyone, and so any commercial enterprise competing with US corporates must assume any US component of their systems is compromised. The US will cease to ne the world leader in technology unless trust can be rebuilt.
So the US tech giants are responding to a very real existential threat and know no mere PR exercise will solve the problem.
No, they know a PR excercise will not succeed but they’ll try anyway because they have no alternative: the US government will not meaningfully budge on this, oh no.