Updated 12:15 am Pacific Saturday
[I]nstead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.
The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.
Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company.
Michael Arrington uses deductive reasoning to conclude that the tech companies implicated in the latest NSA data snooping are dissembling.
The fact that President Obama has acknowledged the program (PRISM) should be reason enough to conclude that the tech companies aren’t being forthcoming.
As I noted Thursday, in 2006 the telecos were full of denial then, too.
What seems missing from most news stories is an explicit acknowledgement that this is top secret information. You know. Stuff you are sworn not to tell or else you get thrown in jail. (See Bradley Manning, who did not share anything labeled top secret. And his court martial has certainly moved out of the news cycle, hasn’t it?)
Oh, and it’s legal to lie when you know top secret stuff. (News stories aren’t making this point clear, either.)
Why is this relevant? Almost 1 million people had top secret clearance in 2010, but I doubt press spokesmen fall into this category. So they can repeat the company line with plausible deniability. Just like they did in 2006.
Here are the denials, now and then. Common phrasing highlighted.
- Apple:
“We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.” - Facebook:
“We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.” - Google:
“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.” - Microsoft:
“We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.” - Yahoo!:
“Yahoo! takes users’ privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.” - Verizon:
If faced with a court order, we’ll comply. - Verizon (2006):
“One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers’ domestic calls. This is false.” - Qwest (2006):
Qwest declined to participate in the NSA program. - BellSouth (2006):
“Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA.” - AT&T (2006, Room 641A):
“AT&T does follow all laws with respect to assistance offered to government agencies,” said Walt Sharp, the AT&T spokesman. “However, we are not in a position to comment on matters of national security.”“AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against the company.”
The latest news is that UK security agency GCHQ is also gaining information from world’s biggest internet firms through US-run Prism programme.
The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.
Conclusion: the tech companies are sending NSA a copy of the data, probably daily like Verizon. And we know that there is a court order (FISA) because the President acknowledged the program.
Just because something is legal does not make it right, moral or ethical.
Perhaps the most oversused word in the English language, at least when it comes to government officials justifying their actions, is “legal.” The word merely means that government officials jumped through the nominally appropriate rituals required to authorize themselves to do something. It doesn’t mean the something they authorized themselves to do is respectful of the rights of others, morally upstanding, or wise. Pass a constitutional amendment (or just repeal a few laws in many countries) and you could even make rape and murder “legal.” But they’d still be offenses against human rights and simple decency.
What do you think?
If you are a PR person, what would you do?
If you had knowledge of these programs, would you take the risks associated with revealing them?
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com