NSA surveillance: Tech Giants push for significant action

The defensive attitude of the tech companies to protect their image and market reputation against the NSA surveillance on user information is slowly and steadily converting into criticizing the government and eventually aggressively challenging them in court.

“Clearly, this is something new and different,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, “right now it’s like, ‘Please make it stop!’ ”, he sighed.

Months passed by as the tech companies asked the government to be more transparent about its surveillance requests. Now they have started demanding substantive new restraints on how the National Security Agency collects and uses the vast quantities of information from the data streams of the US companies.

The rising agony and uncanny backlash from the techie society is striking at the softest spine of President Obama who got immense support from this arena last year. It may affect badly the-once-so-rosy relationship with the Silicon Valley.

“Even though we suspected this was happening, it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America”, a senior engineer of a famous tech company wrote.

In reply to this the agency issued a statement on last Thursday stating “NSA conducts all of its activities in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies — and assertions to the contrary do a grave disservice to the nation, its allies and partners, and the men and women who make up the National Security Agency” even though some scholars argue that the NSA’s collection of data from Google, Yahoo and their users might violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on illegal search and seizure.

Previously the leaders like Google and Yahoo were at first just telling their customers a little bit more about how many FISA requests they had been given by the government. May be the FISA threats haven’t meant much but this enormous invasion of their data streams has the potential to cost them billions in losing “cloud computing” revenues from around the world which was thought to be the gateway for a futuristic revenue earning source.

• About the Author

About Sankha Ghosh

Sankha Ghosh was never born in that 'City of Joy', never was a banker, never watched a Godard, never loved Kafka, never fell for that Solitary Reaper, never danced on a friend’s wedding, never fought for human rights, never had a crush at college and never ever aspired to work on a novel! Never was he as simple as this! #He wishes