Reform Government Surveillance

I thought Facebook had CIA backing?

I find it interesting how the concept of countries and nationalities seems to becoming less important. Now (as opposed to a hundred years ago) we communicate with people in foreign countries on a daily basis - even countries whose governments have hostile relationships with.

This is definitely a CYA (cover your ass) maneuver designed to mitigate the political hit these companies are taking. At the same time, these companies are acting like countries. They've formed an alliance and they're attempting to make a treaty with the governments that they happen to fall into. It will be interesting to watch the societal change as the importance of countries and nationalities decreases over the next hundred years.

This is getting ridiculous. The ad empires built on stalking every single breath of every single human want to take governments to task on the topic of stalking. What about cleaning up your own house first?

1. Limiting Corporations’ Authority to Collect Users’ Information

Corporations should codify sensible limitations on their ability to collect and disclose user data that balance their need for the data in limited circumstances, users’ reasonable privacy interests, and the impact on trust in the Internet. In addition, corporations should limit surveillance to specific, known users for lawful purposes, and should not undertake bulk data collection of Internet communications.

2 Oversight and Accountability

Corporations seeking to collect or compel the production of information should do so under a clear legal framework in which corporations are subject to strong checks and balances. Reviewing courts should be independent and include an adversarial process, and corporations should allow important rulings of law to be made public in a timely manner so that the courts are accountable to an informed citizenry.

3 Transparency About Corporations collecting practices

Transparency is essential to a debate over corporations’ surveillance powers and the scope of programs that are administered under those powers. Corporations should publish the number and nature of collected user information.

4 Respecting the Free Flow of Information

The ability of data to flow or be accessed across borders is essential to a robust 21st century global economy. Corporations should not collect user information in other countries with the intent of circumventing the local laws that limit user data collection.

It seems peculiar that Apple is a signatory:

> Sincerely,

> AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo

and their logo appears in the listing @ the end of the page, but their logo isn't in the beginning of the page, and they don't provide a quote from their CEO nor legal counsel, per the other signing companies.

Last-minute change of heart, lukewarm support...?

Among other things, this is the tipping point for how Snowden will be viewed.

If all these powerful companies agree, in an unprecedented show of unanimity, that this is an important problem, then Snowden is ipso facto a hero for bringing it to our attention.

The curious thing is, I feel the linkage works in the other direction too. If Snowden had been caught and was now having his brains scrambled by solitary confinement in some secret prison, these companies would have been at least slightly more reluctant to issue such a statement, because it would have seemed to be espousing the cause of someone people were hearing described on the news as a criminal.

Snowden made his disclosures much more effective by escaping.