This is all straw man PR at this point.<p>If companies were REALLY concerned with this, there would have been stories years before Snowden came forward with titles such as "Microsoft Demands US Government Allow More Transparency on Security Concerns with 'Potential' Constitutional Implications"<p>Instead the cat is out of the bag and now all of a sudden these companies want to talk about how the gag order is
something they all hate.<p>Better to ask forgiveness, I guess.
We call for Microsoft to implement end to end encryption/intuitive client side encryption for their services if "our privacy (really) is their priority" - and maybe even turn Skype back to P2P. Otherwise this just seems like a "Whoops, we got caught for allowing NSA to spy on our users since 2007 [1] - now let's do something quick to improve our PR" type of thing.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/images/prism-slide-5.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...</a><p>Also, the calls for boycotting US companies over this seems to have worked pretty well so far [2], just as I expected, and the companies are now starting to use their money and influence to fight against the spying, in our name - which as I've said before it may just be the only thing to change the US government's mind over the mass spying apparatus, because I don't think having just us complaining about it will work - short of a million-man protest in front of the White House or a nation-wide revolution.<p>[2] <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/17/nsa-court-challenges-tech-firms" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/17/nsa-court-challe...</a><p>But I think this is merely the beginning, and it's not nearly enough [2] to convince the US government that it needs to stop, so we need to push more with the boycotting.<p>[3] <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/07/a_call_to_boycott_us_tech_plat.html" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/07/a_call_to_boycott_us_tech_pl...</a>
So what happens if these companies release this data without the AGs explicit permission? Why not just ban together with Google et. al. and publish it?