Re:The PRISM letter Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Microsof...
by grey-area on Thursday July 18, 2013 @05:49PM
(#6066782)
But as far as I can tell, the affected companies are the victims here. They were forced into doing this by the US government. There's no "cooperation" when the US government says "we are legally compelling you to do this".
I totally agree this is (belatedly) a step in the right direction, and I'm pleased Google are getting together with other SV companies to question the right of government to extract data at will from their servers, but we don't really know if PRISM was a voluntary program or not at this point, or even what the extent of the surveillance is, because no-one is willing to tell us. So it's hard as a customer to decide where Google stands on this.
Are other companies like Twitter and Amazon cooperating with PRISM? As far as I understand it some companies are cooperating, and some are not, and some like Apple only agreed relatively recently, unlike say Microsoft, Yahoo or Google. The response to the news that they had been cooperating was also a bit odd because rather than siding with their customers and asking for more transparency at that point, the non-denial denials issued told us nothing about what exactly Google have been doing, but lots about what they're not doing in quite specific terms.
The real focus of people's anger should of course be the government which has insisted these companies take part, and refuses to allow any transparency on numbers and methods, but there are lingering suspicions about whether the practices are legal, and whether companies were actually obliged to take part on pain of sanctions, or just strongly encouraged to do so.
I totally agree this is (belatedly) a step in the right direction, and I'm pleased Google are getting together with other SV companies to question the right of government to extract data at will from their servers, but we don't really know if PRISM was a voluntary program or not at this point, or even what the extent of the surveillance is, because no-one is willing to tell us. So it's hard as a customer to decide where Google stands on this.
Are other companies like Twitter and Amazon cooperating with PRISM? As far as I understand it some companies are cooperating, and some are not, and some like Apple only agreed relatively recently, unlike say Microsoft, Yahoo or Google. The response to the news that they had been cooperating was also a bit odd because rather than siding with their customers and asking for more transparency at that point, the non-denial denials issued told us nothing about what exactly Google have been doing, but lots about what they're not doing in quite specific terms.
The real focus of people's anger should of course be the government which has insisted these companies take part, and refuses to allow any transparency on numbers and methods, but there are lingering suspicions about whether the practices are legal, and whether companies were actually obliged to take part on pain of sanctions, or just strongly encouraged to do so.