Silicon Valley called on Congress this week to mandate greater transparency from the NSA after being swept up in multiple allegations of ethically questionable surveillance since summer, while agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander seeded a cloud of fear over such changes.
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Tech giants Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL sent a letter to members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees Thursday asking for permission to make public the surveillance information requests they receive from the government, and emphasized the need for greater transparency and oversight reform for agencies like the NSA.
“Transparency is a critical first step to an informed public debate, but it is clear that more needs to be done. Our companies believe that government surveillance practices should also be reformed to include substantial enhancements to privacy protections and appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms for those programs,” the letter said.
The letter coincided with a week of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee by NSA Director General Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Representatives equally questioned and chastised the two over the latest NSA surveillance revelations of tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, and the collection of European’s phone data.
The breach of privacy and international trust finally pushed Congress and the White House to call for a full review of the agency’s programs, “to make sure that what they’re able to do doesn’t necessarily mean what they should be doing,” the president said earlier this week.
That did not stop Clapper and Alexander from not only staunchly and unapologetically defending the programs’ status quos, but spreading a cloud of fear and paranoia over Capitol Hill and any prospective agency reforms or limitations.
“Catastrophic attacks are in our future,” Alexander said Wednesday at a Bloomberg Government cybersecurity conference in Washington, The Trentonian reported. “If we take away the tools we increase the risk and we ought to go into that with our eyes wide open.”
The letter “applauds” Captiol Hill’s third major NSA headline of the week – the USA FREEDOM Act written by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and PATRIOT Act author Rep. James Sensenbrenner, which, “would end the dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, “ensure that other authorities cannot be used to justify similar dragnet collection,” and provide “more safeguards for warrantless surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act.”
That includes the creation of a privacy advocate to go before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court with civil liberties concerns over surveillance requests.
“We urge the Administration to work with Congress in addressing these critical reforms that would provide much needed transparency and help rebuild the trust of Internet users around the world,” the letter said.
Related articles
- Why we spy according to the NSA: “Everybody’s doing it” (rare.go-vip.net)
- Senate panel passes plan to restrict but keep mass surveillance (reuters.com)
- NSA Reform Bill Introduced As Agency Remains On The Defensive (huffingtonpost.com)