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Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo Form Alliance Against NSA
mrspoonsi writes "BBC reports: Leading global technology firms have called for 'wide-scale changes' to US government surveillance. Eight firms, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, have formed an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group. The group has written a letter to the US President and Congress arguing that current surveillance practice 'undermines the freedom' of people. It comes after recent leaks detailed the extent of surveillance programs. 'We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer's revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide,' the group said in an open letter published on its website."
thank you for standing up
And if that fails, at least give us a standardized interface to share our data, for saving costs.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
What's their nuclear option? What's their post-nuclear strategy? It's doubtful the NSA is going to change their ways.
While I'm sure the talk about the NSA being able to listen in on their customers will be bad for business, I wonder what they'll do if people start to really take online privacy seriously. That would really cut to the core of their businesses, so perhaps they're really trying to clamp down on it before people start to think about it even more than they already have been.
current surveillance practice 'undermines the freedom' of people.
They really mean "undermines our companies bottom line".
Google is happy to collect all the information it can get its hands on (and get away with), I am sure the others are equally as complicit.
Where is the alliance to prevent Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo (and Amazon) from invading our privacy, tracking users' activities across diverse media, permanently archiving and mining the data for commercial advantage, and reconciling the data with known published information about users by name for even greater exploitation?
Oh, but that's totally different, isn't it Larry, Tim, Mark, Dick, Steve, and Marisssa. That's just so you can provide better services to your customers. That has nothing to do with increasing corporate earnings to impress Wall Street so the CEO can get 8-figure USD annual compensation.
This is nothing but a PR stunt by these firms to save face, since they all happily collaborated with NSA's dirty practices in exchange of dough and political favors.
I say fuck 'em all!!
They will encrypt all their traffic and hard drives but leave open the surveillance API on their running servers to access the data. Or they will share the encryption keys. "All data will be encrypted to protect customers" is nothing more but a PR stunt!
Where is the alliance to prevent Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo (and Amazon) from invading our privacy...
That's in your power. Don't use them, or use them in ways you know they can't track you (disable flash/cookies etc).
It's still a VASTLY better situation than the government, which you cannot opt out of. You cannot realistically not use a phone; you cannot realistically connect to the internet at all and not be at risk of the NSA breaking into your system unwanted.
At least what companies DO is transparent. Anyone can see what the websites are sending/receiving, and you know when you are visiting or making use of them. The same is never true of the government.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not one of those companies gives a damn about your privacy. They all collect and data-mine more information about you than the NSA does, it's why the NSA tapped them to begin with. They are only doing this to a) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries using the privacy scandal to fund competition against them; b) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries from penalizing them legally; and c) for the slight bit of positive marketing with people who believe they care.
We probably won't hear a word about these folks in public TV due to well orchestrated govt control, which makes it less obvious to the public. I say: all seven of these should stand together united with the same message and video on their homepages. That'll force their way into public television networks.
why, in heaven's name, would ANYONE believe this nonsense after all the lying that these corps. and agencies have been stuffing up our butts?
talk about astroturf on a grand scale...more like astroturd.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Messrs Pot, Pot, Pot, Pot, Pot, Pot, Pot, & Pot - Meet Agent Black.
How dare you collect and analyze personal data on our clients! That's our job!
Are they nuts? My Senator says "these tools are required to intercept and obstruct terrorism". He goes on to say that "we must never allow the terrorists to alter the freedoms that define our country and make us the greatest nation in the world". If we stop these programs then the terrorists win!
Since when have any of these companies ever cared a whit or a bit for their customer's privacy? Something clearly does not add up here. Must be a publicity stunt and nothing more.
"Eight leading Internet firms, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, have formed an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group."
As someone else pointed out "Seven leading Internet firms" and AOL
Who's still using AOL , or is still paying for it and actually uses their service. I'm sure I read somewhere that a large percentage of their users are unaware that they no longer needed their AOL subscription to get online via broadband?
Oh hey guys, we still exist!
"Government surveillance"? At least the NSA isn't reading my stuff to figure out how to best sell me things...
So what about corporate surveillance? I'm a lot more worried about the snooping being done in this group of corporations.
Actually, clearly I'm not very worried about that either, since I keep using Windows, Google, Facebook etc.
Sometimes you have to ally with the Soviet Union if you want to defeat Nazi Germany.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
It's right there in their TOU. They use it for business purposes, so they can target you with ads and cut better deals with external advertisers.
How is that different from what the NSA is doing, other than that it was announced in advance? And Google and many other companies have been known to change the TOU's on active accounts when they see fit, always in the direction of diminished privacy. I recently went through a stack of non-bill letters I'd received from American Express over the past five years. Every single one of them was a modification of the terms of my account, in the direction of allowing American Express to make fuller use of the knowledge of my transaction history and to sell the same to outside vendors. What am I going to do, cancel my account? I'm sure some fraction of subscribers do, and American Express has modelled that and is OK with that percent.
He who COUNTS the votes decides everything. Good luck guys. Let us know how it works out for you.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Aren't these the firms that have for years complied silently to dubious NSA requests to hand over user data and/or encryption keys?
FTFA: "rights to provide details of any such future data requests to their users"
This is the only substance in TFA talking about what they "alliance" wants. All that means to me is there will be another EULA full of word-spin everyone will simply click through because it's bullshit.
Until there is a service where you physically posses your encryption key, this is all the same clear-text data laying on disk, wrapped in SSL when it's moving. Still subject to eveasdropping.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
AAAHAHAHahahahaha
The submitter seems to have misspelled "With".
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
go to any 'big' website and view source. can you actually read that javascript stuff? its not meant to be readable and its intentionally obscurred and obfuscated.
It's still in syntactically the same form as source code, and there exist JavaScript beautifiers to remove some of the obfuscation.
its hard to even add blocking regex's since they actively try to thwart that, too.
One thing they'd have a harder time thwarting is DNS blacklisting. If I know a particular hostname means nothing but trouble, I can tell any computer that I control to refuse to resolve that hostname by adding it to the computer's hosts file. This means the server behind that hostname will see no connections from my computer.
Given the number of companies that use their web services for web sites and mobile apps I would be much happier is Amazon was part of this Motley Crue...
Wait ... so the biggest contributors to the NSA will pretend to be against the NSA? Where have I heard that before..
Raise your hand if you are dumb enough to believe this article!
But I think it is pretty obvious that this is more about restoring their brand images than anything else. I don't doubt that they are geniunely miffed about some of the NSA's shennanigans, such as having their private wan connections tapped, but going on about the 'Rights of the individual' seems kind of ludicrous when the reason the government gets information from them in the first place is because they already have it neatly packaged up for the taking. In a nutshell they say "This needs to change because of the rights of the citizens bla bla bla" and all I hear is "This needs to change because the fallout is bad for business." Still, it's better than nothing being done at all right? Those in power can only get away with abusing it by tricking the public into letting them, which they have become very good at, unfortunately.
and now the ugly side is revealed to all, and it is must more uglier than anyone ever imagined
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Anyone who watches MSNBC is well aware that The Huffington Post, the news site owned by AOL, exists.
My rifle and my service to said alliance, and the principles by which it stands. Of internet freedom, liberty, justice and the American way. In support of the Constitution and the First Amendment.
The real issue here isn't what specific thing NSA is or is not doing at a given moment. The issue is that they have been seen to act outside the law, which means all bets are off. There is no reason whatsoever, and will never be any reason, to believe any assurances that they might give in the future that "we've stopped doing X,Y,Z". If the NSA was a person, we'd fire him/her, probably fine and jail him/her, and revoke his/her security clearance and make it impossible for him/her to work in any position of trust ever again. You can't do that with a black-budget government agency, especially not one that has voluminous warehouses full of secret dirt on every US politican, lobbyist and billionaire, past and present. There is no way of ripping them out and replacing them, so you need to defang them. Plus, the NSA is not the only such lawless entity with the technical capability to intercept transmissions. Thus, if these big companies want to form an alliance "against the NSA", what they actually need to do is ally on developing privacy technologies that are impossible to subvert, and spending money on public education so the average man in the street knows better how to practice data hygiene. It has been demonstrated that the NSA regards the law as a set of guidelines about what to reveal in PR documents. You can't retreat from that point - there is no way to trust them ever again. Since we can't cure the disease, we need to manage the symptoms. What these companies have actually done is merely to take a public press position (the phrasing of which was likely developed in conjunction with members of the US government), designed to communicate to Joe Public that these various people with a stake in cloud-based computing are Deeply Enraged(tm) about the NSA. And everything will be fixed with a change.org petition and some legislation that will be obsolete by the time it's passed, and ignored by the NSA when inconvenient anyway. The goal is protecting business models, not protecting data.
I am just a U.S. Citizen. I no longer have a say in what my government does, so I better prop up any company that might help they unConstitutional NSA, which operates with no checks and balances, with the taxpayers blank anti-terrorism check.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/03/parliament_heads_for_ms/ I sometimes just don't believe how jaw droppingly stupid my government is. Unless of course they're just trying to cut out the middleman (GCHQ) and give everything streight to the NSA.
Are they not the 8 firms provided customer information behind the scene to NSA until the incident went public? Yes, of course they never provided NSA anything ... maybe they just conveniently set up their servers a little less secured to allow NSA tap into customer information. To me, it is a lot of BS.
government. The NSA does what those corporations do. Those corporations are not happy that their own government is duplicating their efforts. They are unhappy because the miniscule taxes they pay are being used to do the same things they are doing at their own expense. They want their tax money to be used for other things, things that they themselves can't do (yet), such as invading other countries, firing missiles from drones, shipping undesirables off to third countries to be tortured, etc.
I suggest that if they are unhappy, instead of spending their own money to do the same things the NSA does, they should be encouraging the NSA to share its data with them so the corporations can stop spending so much to develop the surveillance techniques. They can use the freed up funds to buy more politicians to pass laws that allow them to do things like invade other countries, etc., ultimately rendering the NSA redundant and eliminating that piece of competition.
In the future, when Obama or other president (Ted Cruz?) wants to remotely kill someone and 10 or 12 of their closest family members, he should call Verizon for the coordinates and tracking from the target's phone, Google for the mapping info, and Apple to send the drone and missile to do the killing.
If you don't trust the government (fed/state/local), and you don't trust big business, who do you trust? Where does this loss of trust end? Because if you don't trust big business, then why would you trust small business? And if you don't trust government in any form, then why would you trust any government, or literally anyone else? And if your own family betrays you, then what? See, I don't understand this active deconstruction of trust. At some point it has to end, or you end up isolated, alone, paranoid, and suicidal.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Fantastic PR here, but I'll wait and see if anything really comes of it. Sorry to say, I'm very skeptical that this is anything more than good press for these companies. At best, I think it's got very little to do with the 'freedom of the people' and a whole lot to do with the companies fear that the people aren't trusting them anymore. That hits the wallet. I'm sure that group of tech companies has enough cash to throw at Washington to get something done if they want to, but I'm not sure they want to. So like I said, I'll wait and see if anything really comes of this before I get my hopes up.
All your privacy is belong to the 1960s and before.
Welcome to Serfdom.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I guess they don't have much in the way of international business interests to lose.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Oh look, the corporations I don't like are fighting the government I don't like. It's like Christmas had sex with my birthday!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The NSA has to use a CDROM and connect using a 28.8k baud modem to connect to AOL which severely limits how much data they can download.
It also doesn't help that someone down in accounting keeps picking up the phone making them have to start all over again...
You give them that data freely. They are analyzing it. A distinction that is worth noting.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
We need to talk. Good luck with going against this current administration. Piss them off and they all will be on the short end of an audit and an anti-trust action.
And perhaps the EPA, DNR, and any other agency that is bored this week.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh...there seems to be a typo in this article.
Let me help with that..."Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo Form Alliance Against NSA"...
to
"Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo Form Alliance with the NSA"
BULLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLsheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
http://www.henrymakow.com/social_networking_dupes_the_ma.html
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The first result from Google windows 8 hosts file explains that Windows Defender in Windows 8 reverts certain additions to the hosts file to fight phishing malware that hijacks well-known web sites. But if you know what you're doing, you can exclude C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts from Windows Defender. Another, possibly more flexible way is to run a DNS proxy on localhost that interprets a separate hosts file.
From now on they're only going to hand our data to the NSA if they say "please" first.
Previously when I've seen a set of principles espoused to a government by a group of competitors that don't currently follow those principles, it's been a polite request to "give us all a level playing field" by banning something.
If my leaky memory is correct, an association of competing car dealers asked Canada (or perhaps merely Ontario) to set rules about resetting odometers. Customers strongly distrusted odometer readings in those days, and suspected universal dishonesty by used-car dealers. So they asked for it to be made illegal.
It was widely thought that they wished to give up a self-destructive practice, but feared individual business failures if they didn't all give it up at the same time.
If Google and friends say "snooping should be illegal, even for the police", then they need not engage in a race to the bottom with each other.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Here's the problem: the REAL people that should be standing up to NSA snooping are the Level 1 Internet backbone providers: AT&T, Level 3, Sprint and Verizon. Because the NSA directly tapped into the backbone, the spy agency don't need access to the servers at AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo! to get all the information they need. Indeed, I've read that NSA already has special rooms inside AT&T and Verizon operations to directly tap into the backbone--and this known for many years.
The NSA intrusion is already affecting U.S. business. My e-mail is at Yandex.com, which answers to the KGB, not the NSA. I use IxQuick, not Google. My web site is in Thailand. Any company today who creates a web site hosted in the USA is just stupid. There are perfectly competant hosting services outside the NSA's backyard.
I sent an e-mail supporting these eight companies regarding their hopes to limit the Feddie spooks. Yes, of course it is stockholder's equity that is being destroyed. But that makes it no less sincere. If the US can't hold back the NSA then NOBODY will use Google.com. Of course, it is ironic that Google's whole business plan is to know eveything about you. I don't want ANYBODY to know everything about me; I stopped using Google a year before Edward Snowden.
Ahah! There was that name! "Edward Snowden". This post will make it to the bowels of the NSA database. Creepy?
The weird part is that this problem was solved over two hundred years ago. It's called a "search warrant". You want to read my e-mails, go get a search warrant. Otherwise, keep your fingers out of my stuff.
Maybe they should have thought about an alliance *before* the NSA came knocking at their door...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
If NSA can't get info on us by its own methods, they will need to buy it from Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo...just saying