He says it's a matter of national security and that the IT firms are "consumer-centric"

Sep 18, 2013 13:16 GMT  ·  By

John Stratton, Verizon president, takes on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and their stance regarding the gag order the government put on them to forbid making their relations with intelligence agencies known.

The irritated Verizon president made a statement during a visit to Tokyo and called the aforementioned companies “consumer-centric” for trying to overturn the government gag order forbidding them to make their relations with the NSA public, ZDNet reports.

“I appreciate that the consumer-centric IT firms… that it's important to grandstand a bit, and wave their arms and protest loudly so as not to offend the sensibility of their customers. This is a more important issue than that which is generated in a press release. This is a matter of national security,” Stratton said.

Of course, Verizon itself has been in the hot seat for working with the NSA, the name being mentioned alongside other telecommunications companies, in one of the first leaks.

The report at the time indicated Verizon was handing out massive amounts of telephony metadata to the NSA, allowing the agency to detect the phone ID, call durations and a lot of other details.

“The laws are not set by Verizon, they are set by the governments in which we operate. I think it’s important for us to recognize that we participate in debate, as citizens, but as a company I have obligations that I am going to follow,” the exec says.

It doesn’t help his case that new documents were declassified, indicating none of the telecommunications companies the NSA demanded metadata from even thought to oppose the agency. Considering the FISA court ruled such demands as completely legal, the NSA didn’t even provide a court order for the operation since it was all done under the umbrella or “fighting terrorism.”