Several tech companies teamed up against surveillance and now they hired a lobby firm to help push its point

Feb 8, 2014 12:18 GMT  ·  By

Tech companies are taking the battle against NSA surveillance a step further. A while back AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo teamed up to create the “Reform Government Surveillance” coalition and now they’re taking action.

The new coalition hired Monument Policy Group to handle their lobbying efforts to put an end to mass surveillance, especially since all the media reports on the topic have done no favors to their businesses and credibility.

The companies asked nicely for reform of the surveillance policies and while the US government agreed to take some action, ultimately, the changes were superficial.

According to a statement made by Barack Obama recently, the metadata collection program will continue, but there would be two fundamental changes – the NSA would no longer keep the data and the agency would need court orders to access any of the records.

As many have said ever since then, the reform doesn’t really actually change much, since the FISA court is the one who will issue the court orders. Considering the fact that the court hasn’t rejected a request from the NSA in years, it’s easy to understand why the reforms won’t really be effective in protecting users’ privacy.

Also, most recently, the companies protested against the new policy change in regards to what data regarding government surveillance they can include in theis Transparency Reports. Although the tech companies are now allowed to share information about the number of FISA requests they receive, they can only do so in bands of 1,000, something that is unacceptable to them.

Since asking nicely hasn’t really paid off, the companies are now taking a more aggressive stance and are resorting to heavy lobbying. None of the aforementioned companies is a stranger to lobbying in Washington and since there’s been some individual results, they hope that uniting their powers will pay off.