Verizon may not have been able to fight a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, revealed last night by Guardian, to hand over subscribers' call data to the National Security Administration. But over the past decade, the phone company—and its competitors—haven't tried very hard to resist such government surveillance.
As USA Today reported in 2006, the telecom industry started working with the NSA in 2001 to assemble call records of "tens of millions" of Americans. In 2008, the Wall Street Journal detailed how the program had expanded to emails, Internet searches, and bank and credit-card transactions, allegedly including copies of all data going in and out of an AT&T server in San Francisco. Only Qwest, with its tiny market share and a chairman soon afterward convicted of insider trading, declined to participate.
Phone calls, though, aren't the way everyone communicates anymore. A terrorist could just as easily conduct business over Google Voice or Skype, which is encrypted. And troves of information are stored in cloud-based services, on social networks, and on e-commerce websites.
Luckily for consumers, Internet companies tend to be much less willing to share your data with Big Brother. Many companies,1 for example, demand that law enforcement get a warrant if it wants your email, even though the law doesn't explicitly require one for older messages. Twitter, Google, and Microsoft publish transparency reports that show how many times the government requested data, and how often their requests were granted. All of those companies have joined with public interest groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to form the Digital Due Process coalition, which is advocating for updates to privacy law for the Internet age. Google even challenged a national security letter this year. And with the notable exception of Yahoo! and Amazon, these companies do a whole lot better than the telecom ones on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's privacy scorecard—where Verizon rates the worst.
So why is Silicon Valley so much better about safeguarding your stuff? Here are a few possible reasons.
rest http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113399/nsa-collecting-verizon-records-why-internet-companies-fight-back?utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=8998371
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