Given the complicity of most of these companies, there is quite a bit of hypocrisy involved in their call to curtail the NSA’s surveillance powers. Still, I welcome their help in reining in the intelligence community.
The giants of the tech industry are uniting to wage a campaign for sweeping reforms to the National Security Agency.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, LinkedIn and AOL are setting aside their business rivalries to demand that Congress and President Obama scale back the government’s voracious surveillance.
“[T]his summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide,” the companies wrote in an open letter to Obama and members of Congress, appearing in a national print ad Monday.
“The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. … It’s time for change.”
The companies are demanding reforms above and beyond legislation in front of Congress that would curb the NSA’s powers.
It obviously is quite damaging to American computer/software/telecommunications companies when the global consumer has no confidence in those companies’ ability to protect their private information. Part of the deal that the NSA made with these companies was that their role would be hidden and denied. Edward Snowden blew up that agreement, and now there is a commercial necessity to restore consumer confidence.
I would prefer to live in a world where the 4th Amendment is respected even in the absence of a commercial necessity, but I will take what I can get.
