So this week I've been reading <i>Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II</i> by Stephen Budiansky.<p>The US intelligence community has a long history of going right to the communication source and obtaining raw data from public companies. In the 1920's Herbert Yardley's "American Black Chamber" worked with Western Union and other cable companies who turned over interesting cablegrams and radiograms.<p>In 1940 [before the US entered the second world war], the military assigned Lt Earl F. Cook to read and copy cable messages that passed through RCA's office with the consent of RCA's president, David Sarnoff.<p>After the war, there was of course project Shamrock.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_O._Yardley#The_American_Black_Chamber" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_O._Yardley#The_American...</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK</a>
Nothing surprising here. They're fighting tooth and nail to keep their activities under a veil not of secrecy (that's impossible at this point) but of vagueness, which in the end achieves the same purpose: preventing people from caring.<p>The worst part is that the argument brought against transparency actually makes sense on the surface level, but as usual completely ignores the factor of bad actors within the system, which need to be kept in check as much as any hypothetical group of terrorists.
I think by now the situation has come to a point where nobody believes a word of denials coming from any US company when it comes to surveillance and user data. Anybody would just assume they're denying it because NSA tells them to do so and they don't have a choice. Understandably, big companies don't like feeling like ventriloquist's puppets. Maybe they should spend some of those lobbying dollars on putting collar, leash and muzzle on NSA.
There was a time when the trade-off was:<p>1. The government lied and pretends not to engage in domestic espionage.<p>2. To support that lie, the government didn't do much bad stuff with the results of its domestic spying.<p>3. Thus, the domestic spying wasn't a big deal.<p>I think we're past that point now.
If those tech companies decided to release all of their information nothing would stop them (not even the U.S. government).<p>If the U.S. decided to take down every one of those companies or indite their CEOs/Boards the would have an uproar from the populous that would likely be comparable to the 60's (or worse).<p>Essentially, the populous would be more loyal to a company who's honest than a government which is dishonest.
I honestly didn't expect much from this. The part that scares me about all of this is this: if the government can't read our emails, listen to our phone calls, or see our web traffic but they have the ability to... what stops them from outsourcing the work to another country, where there is no constitutional restraint. we outsource everything else, why not our domestic spying?
Probably naive, but what would happen if Google, Facebook, MS just started disclosing everything? What are they going to do shut them down? Seems silly to me that these huge companies can't just give them the middle finger and show them that they're not going to be bullied any longer.
I'll note that the U.S. justification is essentially the same justification made by the "metadata is data" piece by der Spiegel a couple of months ago; if you have enough data <i>about</i> something, it doesn't matter that you don't disclose the contents of that data directly, the harm is already done.<p>Oddly enough, this time it's the tech companies arguing the opposite (that disclosing specific metadata only is OK and not hazardous).<p>Weird world we live in, sometimes...
For those companies that are already public (so not dependent on ability to raise capital), why don't just move all operations overseas and get immune to U.S. government? Prohibitive costs of bandwidth?<p>You can't fight things like that in court, it's as hopeless as Khodorkovsky's attempts to defend himself. Only things that work for businesses is moving out, for people - using strong encryption on personal level.<p>I don't say that legal way should not be taken, it is still good but just to show how far the government is willing to go to defend it's violations of human rights - which should make things clear to those who are still in doubt.
How about they stop requesting and start spilling the beans? Or at least ensure that the relevant evidence winds up in the relevant laps of the relevant journalists. The White House can selectively leak whatever it feels is beneficial to them with impunity. I find it hard to believe that there isn't a single person in any of these companies that hasn't already taken action. Just wait and see I suppose.
Sounds like a nice PR walk-in-the-park.<p>If these companies were serious about protecting their customers, they'd band together and block government mandated mass surveillance <i>entirely, from A to Z</i>. Given their size of the market, the government can't and wouldn't shut them down.