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Tech Leaders Push Back Against Obama's Efforts To Divert Discussion From NSA
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Guardian reports that while President Obama tried to portray a meeting with tech leaders as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities including ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website Healthcare.gov, senior executives from Apple, Yahoo, Google, Comcast, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Netflix said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA. 'We are there to talk about the NSA,' said one executive who was briefed on the company's agenda before the event. After meeting Obama and vice president Joe Biden for two-and-a-half hours, the companies issued a one-line statement. 'We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform.' Many of the senior tech leaders had already made public their demand for sweeping surveillance reforms in an open letter that specifically called for a ban on the kind of bulk data collection that a federal judge ruled on Monday was probably unlawful. Obama seemed sympathetic to the idea of allowing more disclosure of government surveillance requests by technology companies, according to a tech industry official who was briefed on the meeting. Marissa Mayer brought up concerns about the potentially negative impact that could be caused if countries, such as Brazil, move forward with legislation that would require service providers to ensure that data belonging to a citizen of a certain country remain in the country it originates, the official said. That would require technology companies to build data centers in each country — a costly problem for American Internet companies. The decision by the tech giants to press their case in such a public and unified way poses a problem for the White House. The industry is an increasingly influential voice in Washington, a vital part of the US economy and many of its most successful leaders are prominent Democratic political donors."
countries, such as Brazil, move forward with legislation that would require service providers to ensure that data belonging to a citizen of a certain country remain in the country it originates
In other words, a cash grab. Brazil isn't the most enlightened country when it comes to spying, so this is a little "pot kettle black" situation, but really its just an excuse to try to force more companies to spend more money in Brazil. It has absolutely nothing to do with the feigned "outrage" the politicians are espousing.
Monstar L
The companies are concerned about US government surveillance ONLY because
they know it will cost them money.
Otherwise the companies don't care, because if they DID care they would have
raised hell long before now. But the companies did not do that, did they ? No,
in fact they were willing servants for the swine in the government until the revelations
Snowden caused caused their positions to become unpopular. SO now these
companies are setting new records for backpedaling performance. There is not
much if any moral difference between these companies and the Nazis who tried to
claim they were "just following orders" when they were on trial at Nuremberg.
As Vonnegut would have said if he were still around :
"So it goes".
.
Please try to contribute more. GPs comment was admirably strident but lacked substance and subtlety; your post is as useful as saying 'I agree'.
For my part, I still find it hard to take the likes of Google seriously as a defender of privacy. Their recent CEO said terrible things:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/04/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-privacy_n_776924.html
"With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches [...] We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place,"
"In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you,. ... We need a [verified] name service for people, ...Governments will demand it."
Though he has been wise, too. From the same article:
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,"
The point being: Google and the rest of the ad-funded online companies profit from our personal data, and have an interest in the erosion of our privacy.
Whether they like it or not, they have a motive to stop government surveillance of the internet simply because it threatens to make people less willing to share personal information on the internet.
Invasion of privacy is bad, whether it's the government that's doing it, or the people.