BUSTED – U.S. Tech Giants Knew of NSA Spying Says Agency’s Senior Lawyer

This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.

The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.

I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.

So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I‘m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.

– Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in a post last week

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines by posting about how he called President Barack Obama to express outrage and shock about the government’s spying activities. Of course, anyone familiar with Facebook and what is going on generally between private tech behemoths and U.S. intelligence agencies knew right away that his statement was one gigantic heap of stinking bullshit. Well now we have the proof.

Earlier today, the senior lawyer for the NSA made it completely clear that U.S. tech companies were fully aware of all the spying going on, including the PRISM program (on that note read my recent post: The Most Evil and Disturbing NSA Spy Practices To-Date Have Just Been Revealed).

So stop the acting all of you Silicon Valley CEOs. We know you are fully on board with extraordinary violations of your fellow citizens’ civil liberties. We know full well that you have been too cowardly to stand up for the values this country was founded on. We know you and your companies are compromised. Stop pretending, stop bullshitting. You’ve done enough harm.

From The Guardian:

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting month of angry denials from the firms.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

Asked during at a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”

When the Guardian and the Washington Post broke the Prism story in June, thanks to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL –claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had “never heard” the term Prism.

The disclosure of Prism resulted in a cataclysm in technology circles, with tech giants launching extensive PR campaigns to reassure their customers of data security and successfully pressing the Obama administration to allow them greater leeway to disclose the volume and type of data requests served to them by the government.

The NSA’s Wednesday comments contradicting the tech companies about the firms’ knowledge of Prism risk entrenching tensions with the firms NSA relies on for an effort that Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, told the board was “one of the most valuable collection tools that we have.”

Move along serfs, move along.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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3 thoughts on “BUSTED – U.S. Tech Giants Knew of NSA Spying Says Agency’s Senior Lawyer”

  1. This is the whole point. They have to make it look like they don’t know anything nor cooperating with the intelligence agencies. So the sheeple keep using their services. They have to keep the sheeple using the services because this is how the gov. compiles it’s Gestapo database.

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  2. If we want to get serious about restricting databases then we have to have a transparent view of what people are actually collecting in databases and report it for public scrutiny– and it needs to be legally binding, the NSA deserves no less a peek than what everyone else has, you would be foolish to believe global corporations could be trusted not to abuse your data without the NSA — We always get in trouble when we start playing the secrets game

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  3. It is also interesting how people claim value in end-to-end world Internet communication….. The only value in this is deception….The classic problem in international laws is right smack in this argument because the NSA could not tell a company in China that it has to disclose data unless it moved to America, vice versa so the only compromise is world wide spying….Nationalizing Internet traffic makes a ton of sense and I have been saying it for 15 years now….While there is a place for International business it should come at a heavy premium, be screened accordingly —meaning I am somewhat in agreement with Putin and I’m from the USA ——- trolling International traffic should be so expensive by the minute you couldn’t possibly hack a profit

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