Laughable. That’s the single word that came to my mind as I read an article in the Atlantic titled “Google, Apple, and Microsoft Agree: NSA Spying Undermines Freedom”. Now, from their title, it sounds as if these companies were standing up for you, the user of their products and services. What actually transpired though, was something far different, and closer to the title of this article. Indeed, these giant corporations that wield so much influence over your life, have sent a letter to the government, which also wields entirely too much influence over your life. This letter outlines 5 points, which these companies say should restructure the manner in which they help said governments spy on you. You may or may not think such restructuring would be an improvement, but what’s certain is that they are all too happy to continue assisting the government in spying on you, and have no intention of even asking permission not to.
They are requesting reforms, like more transparency, limiting surveillance to users actually suspected of crimes, and judicial oversight.
Sounds good, don’t it?
Here’s the thing though… Laws requiring all those things, and more, were passed in 1791, in an act known today as “The Bill of Rights”. Those laws, now on the books for 222 years, have done exactly nothing to prevent the modern surveillance State from emerging. Those laws are part of the Constitution, which is purported to be the “Supreme Law of the Land”. What anyone thinks a little bit of scribble from the liars, murderers, and thieves in Washington today will change, truly escapes my imagination.
The fact of the matter is, these requests are about as meaningful as Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, and promises of being able to keep your health care plan. It’s a marketing gimmick, by the same people who have for years been complicit in the violation of your privacy, in violation of the contracts they require their users to agree to before using their services. These companies are talking about the Snowden leaks as if these things were news to them, but it is well publicized that these companies were actively involved in the surveillance. They knew about it, and did nothing to stop it. If one of them had blown the whistle, Ed Snowden never would have had to.
Where did I hear of this story? Well of course, it was the lead story on my Google News feed!
Perhaps they are concerned about stories from companies like Lavabit. Lavabit was the first tech firm that opted to shut its doors rather than cooperate with the NSA. Their founder Ladar Levison said “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levison wrote at the time. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.”
Levison’s story made headlines, and most people had never heard of Lavabit before this case. If Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook showed half the tenacity of Levison, we can surely expect the surveillance State to fall within minutes. 72% of US adults with Internet access use Facebook, if you take it away from them, not only will you lose the next election, you just might find yourself swinging from a tree. How long a time span does anyone thing there will be between the shutting down of iTunes, and youth riots?
Remember the SOPA & PIPA blackouts in January of 2012? That action (partially) disabled Wikipedia, Reddit, and 115,000 other websites, including Craigslist, Boing Boing, A Softer World, Cake Wrecks, Cyanide and Happiness, Destructoid, DeckTech.net, Entertainment Consumers Association. Free Press, Failblog, Newgrounds, Good.is, GOG.com, Gamesradar, Internet Archive, Jay is Games, Mojang, MoveOn.org, Mozilla, MS Paint Adventures, Rate Your Music, Reddit, Roblox, Oh No They Didn’t, Tucows, blip.tv, Tumblr, TwitPic, Twitter, The Oatmeal, VGMusic, Wikia, WordPress, xkcd as well as the corporate site of the Linux distribution openSUSE and the congressional websites of Silicon Valley representatives Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren.
No SOPA, no PIPA. CISPA later passed the house of representatives, but died in the Senate, never making its way to the desk of the president.
These tech companies can stop the surveillance State any time they see fit. They just don’t want to, and silly little ploys like the letter released today are nothing more than political stunts.