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IBM Distances Itself From the NSA and Its Spy Activities
An anonymous reader writes "NSA surveillance has raised concerns among customers globally about the safety of their data from U.S. government spying. More organizations, companies and countries are looking for ways to distant themselves from the NSA activities to safeguard the information of internet users. IBM is the latest to fall into the category of companies that do not want to be associated with the NSA spy activities."
Are they also stopping donations to politicians who support the NSA activity?
... they are tied to a country which government can require them to put backdoors in software and hardware, and not to tell anyone about that. The only way to really get clean is really open the source/specifications of everything (including propietary firmware) and let people, companies and countries really be able to check that claims. Until then, you can't decide whether they are telling the truth or not. We already learned what happens when you put blind trust in something even bigger than IBM.
And even if we did, it's classified and we couldn't tell you anyway.
Qwest found out what happens when you challenge the NSA--you mysteriously lose government contacts. And then your CEO goes to prison.
Qwest found out what happens when you challenge the NSA--you mysteriously lose government contacts. And then your CEO goes to prison.
And if IBM truly does want to distance itself from these government agencies, that is exactly what they should be doing proactively.
The article has the headline IBM Distances itself from the NSA and its Spy Activities. If IBM were truly distancing itself, the article would have had a list of billions, nay, trillions of dollars worth of contracts that IBM was cancelling, along with an announcement that IBM would no longer make bids on NSA projects, and they would prohibit their products from being used as the backend as far as allowed by law.
Instead IBM has released a very specific bullet list of things they didn't do. For example, one of the bullet points is "IBM has not provided client data ... under the program known as PRISM." Which is a wonderfully worded statement. They might have provided other data under PRISM. They might have provided client data outside of PRISM. But in that specific program, that specific data was not provided.
Sorry Robert C Weber, Senior VP at IBM, your words are too much like a lawyer's wiggling for my tastes. Does IBM really want to distance itself? In that case, actually distance yourself by terminating existing contracts and refusing to bid for future contracts.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement