31–40 of 44 posts
I suppose if at some point Larry Page himself confirms that they did know all about NSA surveillance and actively participated, people will still find ways to acquit the beloved company :) I'm not sure if it's the force of the "no evil" brand or maybe inherent dislike of the government, but user loyalty in PRISM companies is quite remarkable.
I suppose if at some point Larry Page himself confirms that they did know all about NSA surveillance and actively participated, people will still find ways to acquit the beloved company :) I'm not sure if it's the force of the "no evil" brand or maybe inherent dislike of the government, but user loyalty in PRISM companies is quite remarkable.
Why single out Page and Google?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lawyer quoted in the article appears to contradict this: “Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.” That's not a black bag job.
Joe who used to work at Ft. Meade – totally stand-up patriot! – is a senior employee in the company's operations department. He is served the compulsory process, and it is implied that under the process, he should not tell anyone else at the company, including superiors and company counsel. In fact, the senior executives may have even tacitly employed Joe for this role for this very purpose: he's been pre-vetted by t…
As COO of Facebook, she must have known a great deal about what was going on... it would be very interesting for me, given her talk of leadership, if she were asked some questions about this....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Joe who used to work at Ft. Meade – totally stand-up patriot! – is a senior employee in the company's operations department. He is served the compulsory process, and it is implied that under the process, he should not tell anyone else at the company, including superiors and company counsel. In fact, the senior executives may have even tacitly employed Joe for this role for this very purpose: he's been pre-vetted by t…
Really? Can the janitor respond to a warrant being served?
But to consider another variant, I could absolutely see a janitor becoming convinced by men with badges that he must cooperate with their investigation, perhaps by planting a bug or offering out-of-hours access. A janitor could also be convinced by official-looking (and perhaps even truly official!) judicial paperwork that says he's not allowed to tell others.
In the case of my hypothetical 'Joe with Ft. Meade experience', the cooperation is cheerful because he believes in the mission and legitimacy of the request. But under the strange logic of compelled secret compliance, lower-level employees might be coerced into cooperation. (That'd be more likely to be seen as a true corporate infosec failure, rather than a "wink, wink, 'failure'", from the perspective of top executives.)
I suppose if at some point Larry Page himself confirms that they did know all about NSA surveillance and actively participated, people will still find ways to acquit the beloved company :) I'm not sure if it's the force of the "no evil" brand or maybe inherent dislike of the government, but user loyalty in PRISM companies is quite remarkable.
Come again...? So we're breaking the separation of the three powers because otherwise the authorities have to be inconvenienced with the "quite burdensome" task of "going back to court"? He can't be serious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internal corporate collaborators unknown to the executives speaks to a failure of corporate security/infosec. I'd imagine current CEOs are increasing their organizations security measures to protect not only against corporate espionage but also state players. If you are CEO and you are forced to comply that is bad, but not nearly so bad as complying without knowing it is happening. Not knowing doesn't allow you to le…
How many CEOs view their interests as separate and opposed to their home-country security services? That's who protects them from terrorism, sabotage, blackmail, and kidnapping! A corporate infosec policy that keeps out everyone except a few quasi-official security-state moles may be exactly what they want. Earn brownie points, avoid paper trails, "everyone" wins. Probably, helping the security-state even makes keepi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many CEOs view their interests as separate and opposed to their home-country security services? That's who protects them from terrorism, sabotage, blackmail, and kidnapping! A corporate infosec policy that keeps out everyone except a few quasi-official security-state moles may be exactly what they want. Earn brownie points, avoid paper trails, "everyone" wins. Probably, helping the security-state even makes keepi…
So your first post seems to say"the CEOs could plausibly not have known" and this post seems to say "of course the CEOs went along with it!" Which is an entirely different claim. Could you clarify?
The CEOs might know, and think it safe to lie. (That's the "First" part of the topmost post.) They might not know because the NSA only approached targeted lower employees, and the combination of the law and the company's own structure prevents the full decision/compliance from every being told to the CEO. (That's the "Second" part of the topmost post.)
And the reason that the don't "know" could be that the NSA is really good at a targeted approach, or that the CEO has helped by making sure enough people to make the NSA happy are empowered and compartmentalized to do so, without it getting back to him. In such a case, he honestly doesn't "know" exactly whether or how much the NSA is poking around, but that's ignorance-by-design.
If the government were angry at a CEO engineering such ignorance to avoid criminal liability, they'd prosecute under the theory of willful blindness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness
But since the CEO is in this case doing the government a favor, the government will "look the other way" about the CEO "looking the other way"...
Of course they did (do). Just like telcos. What is amazing is the carelessness that the government shows w.r.t. protecting the interests of American tech firms. NSA could hardly have done more to destroy worldwide trust and credibility in our tech industry.
The other side of the coin is that the companies collaborating in these programs seem to put themselves at the mercy of the government rather than making products that can be verifiably trusted.