19.4.14

 

Silicon Valley could force NSA reform, tomorrow. What's taking so long?


CEOs from Yahoo to Dropbox and Microsoft to Zynga met at the White House, but are they just playing for the cameras? Photograph: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
Trevor Timm asks a key question in The Guardian:
The CEOs of the major tech companies came out of the gate swinging 10 months ago, complaining loudly about how NSA surveillance has been destroying privacy and ruining their business. They still are. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently called the US a "threat" to the Internet, and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, called some of the NSA tactics "outrageous" and potentially "illegal". They and their fellow Silicon Valley powerhouses – from Yahoo to Dropbox and Microsoft to Apple and more – formed a coalition calling for surveillance reform and had conversations with the White House.
But for all their talk, the public has come away empty handed. The USA Freedom Act, the only major new bill promising real reform, has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee. The House Intelligence bill may be worse than the status quo. Politico reported on Thursday that companies like Facebook and are now "holding fire" on the hill when it comes to pushing for legislative reform.
...
We know it's worked before. Three years ago, when thousands of websites participated in an unprecedented response to internet censorship legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), the public stopped a once-invincible bill in its tracks. If they really, truly wanted to do something about it, the online giants of Silicon Valley and beyond could design their systems so that even the companies themselves could not access their users' messages by making their texting and instant messaging clients end-to-end encrypted.
But the major internet outfits were noticeably absent from this year's similar grassroots protest – dubbed The Day We Fight Back – and refused to alter their websites à la Sopa. If they really believed the NSA was the threat so many of them have claimed, they'd have blacked out their websites in protest already.

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Comments:
Yes, I wonder what's keeping them:

http://www.vice.com/read/are-google-and-facebook-just-pretending-they-want-limits-on-nsa-surveillance
 
> the online giants of Silicon Valley and beyond could design their systems so that even the companies themselves could not access their users' messages by making their texting and instant messaging clients end-to-end encrypted.

No, they can't. If served with a National Security Letter (NSL) -- which is self-gagging so you can't tell anybody you've received one -- you actually cannot do these things. It is an absolute certainty that the big tech firms have received NSLs.

But of course this doesn't matter because,

> If they really, truly wanted to do something about it,

They don't want to.

The fish rots from the head, and we are way past the point of no return. Things are going to get bad, very bad.

More and more of us are opting out. Wonder why?
 
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