14 DAY TRIAL // Eric Schmidt, ex Google CEO and current Executive Chairman at the company made one of his first public comments on the NSA spying we keep hearing about these days.
Schmidt wasn't keen on the agency's extensive surveillance program, but he wasn't particularly critical of it either.
Instead, his biggest worry was that surveillance would start to hurt the openness of the Internet and that increased spying would create country-sized Internets, something he doesn't want happening. He was speaking in New York at an event by the New America Foundation.
"There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society," he explained.
He added however that a public debate on the nature, scale, and scope of the NSA's spying was long overdue. Schmidt argued that most Americans wanted the NSA protecting them, but they also wanted serious limits and checks against abuse.
He presumes that most of the disclosures made based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden are more or less accurate. However, he once again denied Google's involvement in the PRISM program saying that the company only shared what it was legally required to.
His biggest worry though isn't necessarily the spying, but the international attention. He believes that this tug of war between the powerful nations of the world will create increasingly isolated local versions of the Internet which would undermine all that the Internet stands for.
"The real danger [from] the publicity about all of this is that other countries will begin to put very serious encryption – we use the term 'balkanization' in general – to essentially split the internet and that the internet's going to be much more country specific," Schmidt said.
"That would be a very bad thing, it would really break the way the internet works, and I think that's what I worry about."