Facebook, Microsoft, Apple Make Year-End Lobbying Push to Curb NSA Spying

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-14/companies-call-on-senate-to-pass-bill-curbing-nsa-powers.html

by jacquesm • 12 years ago

138 99 12 years ago

Money. Not altruism or moral compass or even customer demands.

But lost foreign dollars is the wrong argument, right? Restricting the NSA from bulk collecting US citizen data has nothing to do with their legal rights to do the same to non-citizens.

I'd venture to guess that the NSA cares very little how Brazil builds a trans-Atlantic line, they'll still secretly tap it.

And a big HA! for Verizon being sad about the NSA collection while they're unabashedly MITM-ing 100% of its wireless customers.

fpgeek• 12 years ago

Of course money. You make the argument that your audience is most likely to hear. And between lobbying and campaign contributions, jobs for their constituents, lost tax revenue and so on... money is the argument Congress is most likely to hear.

PavlovsCat4• 12 years ago

If Microsoft cares about privacy, when will they change Skype back to the encrypted peer-to-peer architecture it had before they bought it? If Facebook cares about privacy, why is their signup page not just a redirect to diaspora, friendica etc.? And why can't google split stuff up into subdomains, even if that'd mean no precious .google cookies? Okay, the last two are a bit silly, but I just don't feel like looking up and rattling down all those laundry lists of the ways of how they shit all over privacy again and again, just to eek half a percentage point out of something somewhere, in the name of functionality and convenience as if there aren't lots of more promising and unexplored avenues to improve those.

Of course, none of these companies are monoliths, and I don't doubt that there are people in them that genuinely care. But on the whole, you are really* saying that the companies care about privacy, but just pretend it's about money because Congress is more interested in money than they are? I doubt that, mildly put.

lylebarrere• 12 years ago

I'd be interested to see if the tech companies could push out something to their users to help educate them. Something similar to the news feed notification Facebook pushed out asking for donations to fight Ebola.

The real resource these companies have to use is the attention of their users, not money.

applesand• 12 years ago

push out something to their users to help educate them

That is not going to happen b/c it would draw the users' attention to the problem of mass surveillance being conducted (be that explicitly or implicitly) by tech giants for the gov't.

xnull2guest16• 12 years ago

Since when do these companies get such a big say in our Democracy? Since when is "Facebook, Microsoft, Apple Make Year-End Lobbying Push to Curb NSA Spying" a headline and not "American people rally the vote to stop sweeping surveillance"?

Personally, I think it's mostly a show to bolster consumer confidence (rant purposefully left out). But let's say it's not. Why should a handful of private individuals be more important for the direction of legislature than democratic consensus AND what's written into law by the Constitution.

A fluffy feel good piece about how the elite are on your side. Bullshit through and through.

I'm not upset that (publicly) these corporations are against surveillance, I'm upset that it matters.

Yes we live in a Representative Democratic Republic. But I don't remember voting for the board of directors.

PavlovsCat4• 12 years ago

Downvoted within 7 minutes. Nice going.

PavlovsCat4• 12 years ago

When I posted that, the only other replies were fawning about this, and this was as I said instantly downvoted. Sure, it "doesn't add to the discussion", it adds to a discussion about the discussion you don't want to have. Oh well, that's fine, but I stand by my post and would do it again, pile on it all you want. Anyone who thinks this site could possibly be 100% free from PR people has my condolences, and if you think that doesn't matter, then I wonder why you think any of this matters.

rayiner3• 12 years ago

The American people just went to the polls to demonstrate that NSA surveillance is not something they particularly care about. If you're an anti-surveillance civil liberties type, you might be better served backing the companies that have dollars at stake in opposing surveillance than wait for the voting public to come around to caring about the issue.

xnull2guest16• 12 years ago

Really? The NSA was a ballot issue? It was a wedge issue during the congressional elections?

I wanted to vote against collect-by-default programs. But I didn't see the checkbox.

The parties defined the issues for the voters. The Democratic Party ran on the usual 'get out the vote' and The Republican Party ran on equating officials with the Obama administration and discouraged voting except from their base where they could. Both promised financial change but neither advanced anything concrete enough to be a platform.

And did we want a big item like widespread surveillance to be on the ballot during the national elections most famous for poor voter turnout?

Or maybe you're talking about a different ballot?

If you're an anti-surveillance civil liberties type, you might be better served backing the companies that have dollars at stake in opposing surveillance than wait for the voting public to come around to caring about the issue.

A philosophical equivalent to tactical/dishonest voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting).

You're suggesting that I accept the (presumed) assistance of these corporate leaders. I do, actually. But I also do not accept the fact that this class has the power that it does.

These two things are not actually mutually exclusive.

001sky12• 12 years ago

The NSA relies on executive orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12333

Executive orders don't need congress to fix.

Nor are they on mid-term election ballots.

Executive Order 12333 has been regarded by the American intelligence community as a fundamental document authorizing the expansion of data collection activities.[9] The document has been employed by the National Security Agency as legal authorization for its secret systematic collection of unencrypted information flowing through the data centers of internet communications giants Google and Yahoo.[9]

http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execut...

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

Good point. We could have voted in more Democrats, what with their demonstrated position against NSA surveillance. Like Pelosi.

Wait.

guelo• 12 years ago

If you want to use that kind of dumb lazy argument you could also say that the American people voted against NSA spying when they voted against Obama's administration.

But what people actually voted on was a media hype alternate universe that has little to do with any real issues.

zkhalique3• 12 years ago

I don't think the current vote was a referendum on the NSA any more than it was a referendum on guns, as some have alleged. However, we shouldn't discount how the resulting political alliances will affect policy: http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-nra-controls-con...

But when Congress had a 14% approval rating right before being 95% re-elected, you know our democracy isn't exactly letting us vote on the issues.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/nov/...

zkhalique3• 12 years ago

Since this: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-...

xnull2guest16• 12 years ago

The Gilens and Page study is a must read.

javert• 12 years ago

You'd rather see us all live in an Orwellian surveillance society than have American corporations owned by American shareholders defend America? All right, you'll no doubt get what you want, though ultimately at the cost of the republic you claim to be defending.

StavrosK• 12 years ago

Uh, what? No, he'd rather see you all live in a society where you have a say in what's going on.

tn13• 12 years ago

People rarely care about government decisions that do not affect them directly. People are generally blind to secondary effects of any government policy. Price control and Minimum-wage are prime examples.

Facebook or Microsoft are not entities in themselves but they represent their investors which are just people just like you and me. Whatever these companies do essentially represents the will of those people. It makes perfect sense for their lobbying because they are the ones who are likely to get affected in long because of increases cost of their services and reduced credibility.

StevePerkins• 12 years ago

Most people aren't voting, period. The U.S. just had federal elections a couple of weeks ago, and two-thirds of the country stayed home:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/opinion/the-worst-voter-tu...

I get it. The system is broken, and there are no good choices to vote for (when a race is even contested at all), so why bother? Except that the reason why the system is broken in the first place is that no one shows up at any stage of the game.

* We don't show up in local and state elections, where the politicians are elected who draw the maps and gerrymander the congressional districts.

* We don't show up for the primaries, where the candidate who is going to win that gerrymandered district is selected.

* Then we don't show up for the general election. Admittedly, most races are a foregone conclusion by this stage, and there aren't good candidates to choose from. However, even at this stage there is always at least a "lesser of two evils". With only 35% turnout, the outcome could be flipped in even the most gerrymandered of districts if people were simply engaged and showed up.

Money drives the system, but only because the public is so disengaged, and votes for whoever has the funds to shout at us the loudest. I don't know how you break the cycle of cynicism and instill some civic responsibility in the average Joe, but there's never going to be some external savior who swoops in from the outside and magically makes things less corrupt. Is has to come from us.

rayiner3• 12 years ago

As someone who doesn't vote, let me explain why. It's not because I'm cynical. It's because I'm fine with whoever wins. Both parties are pretty close to each other on the issues I care about. Neither party will dismantle either our military or the welfare state. Taxes are not going to fluctuate more than +/- 5%. Nobody is going to dismantle Obamacare. Abortion is here to stay, legalization of same sex marriage is inevitable, etc. And I think these are all good things and I have no pressing incentive to vote to change the status quo.

I understand that other people don't have the same views and want to see fundamental change. But I think most people really don't want fundamental change. They maybe want to move the needle a bit one way or another, but they're basically okay with how things have evolved to be.

There was a great graphic on reddit the other day showing voter preferences by party. There is little difference between peoples' priorities with the exception of the military. Everyone cares about jobs and social security. Nobody cares about the environment or infrastructure. I find it difficult to look at the US and think anything other than that it closely reflects what your typical voter wants, or at least represents the inevitable compromise between what subsets of typical voters want.

baddox5• 12 years ago

I get it. The system is broken, and there are no good choices to vote for (when a race is even contested at all), so why bother? Except that the reason why the system is broken in the first place is that no one shows up at any stage of the game.

The system is broken, but I think it's broken in a different way than what you're suggesting. It's not broken because people don't show up to vote. On the contrary, people don't show up to vote because the system is broken, and it's not just broken because there are only two relevant parties and corporations exert a lot of influence. It's broken because many people correctly calculate that the impact of their individual vote has less value than the cost of physically voting, and even less so than the cost of educating themselves about the candidates and issues.

The democracy in the US is especially broken for more specific reasons (like the two-party dominance and gerrymandering), but democracy in general is a bad way to aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people.

Omniusaspirer• 12 years ago

I don't know how you break the cycle of cynicism and instill some civic responsibility in the average Joe

You can't.

There's never going to be some external savior who swoops in from the outside and magically makes things less corrupt

That doesn't mean people aren't going to keep clinging to that joke of a hope.

Look at Google Fiber! It's people getting excited that one huge corporation is going to save them from the other massive corporations. We read articles about how the tech giants are going to save us from the NSA (oh the hilarity of Google and Facebook being on that list). We all love Tesla because we cling to a hope Elon will save us from dealerships and "Big Auto". Lots of people buy organic in the hope it will save us from "Big Agro" and be healthier. We like reading about battery and alternative energy companies because it's gonna save us from "Big Oil". We like reading about the miracle cancer cure that "Big Pharma" has allegedly chosen to ignore for evil reasons.

All of our media outlets have realized this trend and shifted to printing puff pieces about our favorite "saviors". At this point the average American has zero hope for real citizen motivated change, so we'll keep hoping for a savior that's never going to come right up until the second this ship crashes into the iceberg.

parasubvert• 12 years ago

A fluffy feel good piece about how the elite are on your side. Bullshit through and through.

These guys aren't the elite. The elite are from a different generation, and different industries. This is part of their play to replace them with the new generations.

And this is the US system "functioning as intended", btw.

Yes we live in a Representative Democratic Republic. But I don't remember voting for the board of directors.

You don't have to vote for the board, the supreme court and constitution ensures the elite is always to have more say than you.

The US government was structured specifically to contain the power of the propertyless majority against the new propertied elite. You couldn't even vote if you weren't a property holder until at least 1850.

The founding fathers didn't like the UK aristocracy because it was hereditary and corrupt, but they certainly wanted to protect and grow that they and other minority "gentlemen" had collected.

There was a swing to more populist influence for the past century, but now with bipartisan distrust at a high, the Citizens United decision, and the very slow uptake of issues like Lessig's Mayday PAC, we are decades away from having any substantive progress on this. I'd underscore: by design. Give the power to the people, but not so much that the elite aren't first among equals.

(EDIT: clarity)

xnull2guest16• 12 years ago

I would add here that the current compression of wealth into top tiers has exacerbated the situation. The top 1% currently own approximately 70% of assets in America (Piketty); the Walton family's brood will be inheriting wealth that amounts to the combined holdings of the bottom three quarters of black households.

The steeper the gini curve (or better metric), the fewer families compose the elite. The last time America was squeezed this tightly we found ourselves in a Great Depression and tens of millions of people marched the streets. This resulted in a 94% tax on the rich (among other things).

We're finding ourselves there again - slowly. Our Great Recession isn't the final expression of these systematic pressures - Keynesianism can only do so much when macroeconomic failures are but a symptom of societal issues.

The other day I spoke on a bus with a very well-spoken yet disillusioned man who had internalized that no matter how hard he worked he would never be able to join the class of people around him, who were mostly amusing themselves with smart phones. He was antagonistic - a little of it misplaced toward those who had inherited rather than designed class separation - and he was agitated. He struggled to understand how the "land of the free" TM could fix him into a modern equivalent of indentured servitude and who he should be angry at that this condition was his at birth.

The point is well taken that America's roots in Jeffersonian Democracy blesses those who are fortunate enough to arise from the correct vagina or who are given a leg up or are married to such a person. In context of the past four and a half decades there are fewer and fewer blessed vaginas to be born from and more for us chumps.

001sky12• 12 years ago

This article has an an absurd premise.

A Democrat controls the NSA (POTUS).

They don't need to lobby anyone in congress.

EdSharkey• 12 years ago

I don't understand. President Obama seems to be a great friend to the NSA, and I understand the NSA has greatly expanded powers under his administration. President Obama threatened openly in a press conference to punish whistleblowers after the Snowden fiasco blew up.

Why should we put any faith in President Obama and lobby him to do the right thing now? The opacity, doublespeak and contempt shown to the people by this administration ranks it at the bottom in my book.

001sky12• 12 years ago

Nothing congress is going to pass will become law without POTUS signature.

The premise of this article is>>> that OBAMA will sign {#INSERT_LAW_HERE}.

So why not just sign an (new) executive order? eg.

NSA's mission, as set forth in Executive Order 12333, is to collect information that constitutes "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" while not "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons". NSA has declared that it relies on the FBI to collect information on foreign intelligence activities within the borders of the United States, while confining its own activities within the United States to the embassies and missions of foreign nations

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/meet-executive-order-...

lern_too_spel4• 12 years ago

Then you understand wrong. According to Snowden's documents, the NSA has diminished its powers under the Obama administration (e.g., bulk collection of email headers for feeding their social graph and proposing to end bulk collection of call log data).

cowpig• 12 years ago

I find this article interesting in that it describes a direct clash of motives between two major systematic problems in American government at present: corporate capture of politics, and the runaway NSA.

What needs to happen is for both of these forces to be curbed, before they find a compromise that I don't expect to be in the best interest of the people.

declan2• 12 years ago

corporate capture of politics

If you look at which companies can actually make things happen in DC[1], it's the ones that are regulated (the reasons for this should be obvious with some thought). Those are not Silicon Valley companies, by and large, but telecommunications firms like AT&T and VZ.

And it's those telecommunications firms that have long-standing surveillance "partnerships" with the NSA, according to leaked Snowden docs, which I wrote about last year here: http://www.cnet.com/news/surveillance-partnership-between-ns...

Here's one reason those regulated telecom companies may not be eager to see reform happen:

"ATT, Verizon, Sprint Are Paid Cash By NSA For Your Private Communications" http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/09/23/attveri...

[1] AT&T/VZ/Comcast rolled Google/eBay/etc. on Net neutrality in Congress. Twice. Silicon Valley-backed NN bills were defeated in both the House and the Senate. And heck, Silicon Valley can't even get a permanent R&D tax credit passed. They've been trying forever to get a ECPA reform passed (this has failed). DMCA reform? Over a decade, nothing. They should be heavyweights or superheavyweights but they're bantamweights instead.

throwawaykf052• 12 years ago

Given that the NSA was going to get data from the telcos in any case, you'd rather they got it for free? If there is some sort of behavior you want to discourage somebody from engaging in, the simplest way of doing so is to make them pay for it. Even nominal fees can be a significant deterrent (this is why ads and eyeballs are the currency of the web). Without this monetary friction, there would doubtless have been even more rampant data collection.

Additionally, the link you provided itself says that the money the telcos got from that is a small fraction of their total revenues, so I am not sure how compelling a reason that would be to oppose reform.

sandstrom• 12 years ago

Yes, this is so true.

It's difficult to be against things on principles when the outcome is desired, but I'd argue that's the only 'right' thing. I.e. lobbying should be condemned even though the outcome may be in line with ones interests (reducing gov-spying in this case).

This illustration comes to mind: https://mayday.us/campaigns/illustrations/be-a-good-politici...

drjesusphd• 12 years ago

I don't think it's that much of a clash. These companies are the exception, which makes for a noteworthy article.

There's one sector in particular that has been suspiciously mum about the whole thing. A sector that relies heavily on secure communications and has tremendous influence on the US government: Wall Street.

lwh• 12 years ago

Maybe Facebook should stop trying to bug the entire web if they care about spying so much.

trvz• 12 years ago

The only people winning here are the ones who studied law, and now are lawyers, lobbyists and politicians…

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

"Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate’s intelligence committee, has said there’s no urgent need to pass the bill. The law authorizing the NSA to collect bulk phone records expires on June 1, meaning the new Congress can wait until then to pass legislation, Chambliss told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in October."

So this is a public discussion and debate that the country is going to have any way between now and next Fall.

The question then becomes "Why this news article right now?"

Looks a bit like political posturing. If your party is on the way out, you can pretty much propose anything you'd like. Nobody is going to vote it trough, so you get credit for taking a position that you'll never have to live through or defend. It's a win.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for limiting NSA. I'd just like it to really happen, instead of reading 100 articles like this over the next ten years while nothing ever changes, which is the way this seems to be playing out.

For whatever reason, the establishment, that is, both parties, seem to have secretly decided that it's perfectly okay to have the government sifting through all of our personal lives. I like seeing this lobby group make an economic argument to the Republicans: this is killing our tech sector. I like seeing folks in both parties make a freedom argument: this is the not values our country was constructed on. I even like my personal argument from pragmatism: our country cannot keep operating in such a manner. But all of these arguments seem to just bounce off a stone wall. I hear all kinds of people talking, I see speeches made and bills sponsored that will never see the light of day. I see bills that have a chance of passage that look like they hamstring the government but in fact just allow it to keep doing what it's doing. The only thing I'm not seeing is any real movement here. I'm hoping that will change.

CyberDildonics• 12 years ago

So with all these companies' support what I don't understand is why an IP standard is not being worked on that demands asymmetric encryption. I envision an ideal future where the IP layer is encrypted, possibly with multiple algorithms, the http layer is encrypted separately, and the javascript message passing layer is encrypted still separately from that.

We already know that encryption works mathematically, but human factors get in the way. No one should ever be able to snoop on someone's traffic content in this day and age.

final• 12 years ago

Because the "support" is just a PR move.

Facebook, Microsoft, Apple Make Year-End Lobbying Push to Curb NSA Spying

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