14 DAY TRIAL // What harm could possibly come from the NSA spying on everyone? Well, tech giants in the US fear that it will rupture the entire Internet, which is bad news for business and for the American economy, especially given the size of the tech sector.
Execs from top Silicon Valley companies were discussing things over at a roundtable organized by Senator Ron Wyden, one of the main protesters against mass surveillance. The group included Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, Colin Stretch, general counsel at Facebook, Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft, and others from Dropbox, Greylock Partners and more.
Breaking the Internet
“The simplest outcome [of NSA spying] is that we end up breaking the Internet. What’s going to happen is that governments will bring in bad laws and say ‘we want our own Internet and we don’t want to work with others.’ The cost of that is huge to knowledge and science, and has huge implications,” said Google’s Schmidt.
What he is talking about has already started to happen and discussions about local Internet networks have taken place in several nations, including Brazil. Russia has already taken some measures towards this by making it mandatory for tech companies that deliver products to local Internet users, including Google, Facebook and all others, to store Russian citizens’ data locally. This is only going to solve part of the problem, but it’s still a fracture in the way things work now.
The Google executive chairman said that during the summer he spent some time in Germany, where he talked to many people, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the NSA has spied on. Merkel reportedly told Schmidt that knowing the NSA were listening to her calls to her family reminded her of the Cold War surveillance tactics.
Senator Wyden took a stance as well, expressing his already-known opposition towards mass surveillance. “It is time to end the digital dragnet, which harms American liberty and the American economy without making the country safer. The US government should stop requiring American companies to participate in the suspicionless collection of their customers’ data, and begin the process of rebuilding trust both at home and abroad,” he said.
What's with the outrage over phone encryption?
The senator also addressed another issue that has come up in recent days, namely the outraged attitude displayed by the FBI, the Europol and the outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder regarding the built in encrypted capabilities of Google and Apple smartphones. They have all taken an interest in the topic, saying that they were just going to make life easier for criminals and that having access to such data was essential during missing children cases and terrorist threats.
Both Google and Apple have announced that their upcoming mobile OS updates will come with encryption, which will make phone call data, messages and so on useless for law enforcement.
Wyden said that the police already has all the powers it needs to monitor criminal activity, while any backdoors in the software could be exploited by hackers and the very same criminals they want to catch.
Of course, the entire fact that these two companies who commandeer the smartphone market decided to encrypt phone data isn’t a surprise, but rather the logical response to people’s need for privacy following the NSA revelation. Had there been no dragnet spying, there would be no need for such “extreme” measures.
Better privacy laws are an option
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said there were two ways to protect privacy. One is making better technology, while the second is coming up with stronger privacy legislation. He points out that America’s data protection laws are 30 years old and all technology that was available back then now belongs in a museum.
One example is the law allowing police to get its hands on emails that are older than 180 days, which are considered “legally abandoned.” Of course, that may have been the case decades ago, but nowadays we all have thousands of emails in our inboxes dating back many years, which makes the piece of legislation obsolete.
Smith argued that if people create something and it is being held on their home PC or in a data center, it is their property.
Ultimately, however, this is a threat to the power of the tech industry in the United States because, as Smith points out, 96 percent of the world’s population lives outside the US and if all these people cannot trust US-based businesses, then the entire thing will collapse.
Although reforms have been promised by the US government, little had been done so far. In fact, several bills have been stuck in Congress for months and there’s little indication that they will move on any time soon. It’s been 16 months since the first NSA reports hit the media thanks to Edward Snowden’s documents.