Tech firms push back against White House efforts to divert NSA meeting
Interesting to see the way that change is playing out:<p>1) Person blows whistle / leaks information about government surveillance<p>2) World trust in US firms is damaged, especially internationally. Foreign firms and governments hesitate to trust US firms with their data. US firms lose contracts and relationships sour.<p>3) US firms whose interests are hurt lobby for surveillance reform<p>Personally, I think the crux of the issue is the doctrine that, if a company is a party to handling my data, whether privately or as part of delivery to another person, that company may voluntarily share information with the government. I think it's a failing of our constitutional law against unreasonable search and seizure that this precedent was set. (I'm not a lawyer but that is my understanding - please correct me if I'm wrong.)<p>In the modern world, virtually all of our communication involves other companies, and so if those companies can voluntarily act as effectively agents of the government in providing the government data, then from my perspective this dodges the intent of the Fourth Amendment. Especially given modern adoption of cloud computing - my papers and personal effects are rarely present solely on my property. Technological progress in cloud computing should not erode fundamental constitutional protections. With that precedent, it has.<p>As all data increasingly goes digital, it is wrong for our society to present a conflict of interest: either keep my data myself, and lose out on modern technology; or use modern technology and be subject to omnipresent surveillance. The better option is to reform our laws so that constitutional protections extend to digital information, wherever it is kept, as well as "papers".<p>Would it be reasonable to change the laws of our society such that no person may share another person's digital information with the government [1], except as required by law, or unless they specifically believe that person guilty of wrongdoing? Perhaps such an approach could form the basis for much more effective protection against unreasonable search.<p>[1] I realize getting this right is going to be tough. Perhaps it's "no digital information created by the person, or metadata about that information". What I'd be looking for is a reasonable digital equivalent of "papers and effects".<p>Perhaps such a relationship could be negotiated through private contract today (e.g. terms of service). The asymmetrical relationship makes this difficult to achieve as a consumer. (This leads me to wonder: do the terms of service of major Internet firms permit them to share your information with the government?)<p>Maybe the first place to start is pushing Internet companies to adopt terms of service that prohibit sharing your information with government agencies (or with any other firm who does not have such a clause in its relationship with the first company), except as required by law.<p>If the tech companies who met with the President want to lead reform in this space, they could begin by changing their terms of service to explicitly prohibit voluntarily sharing your data with governments or firms who may voluntarily share that data with governments. Of course, that might strain their relationships with those governments, and harm their business in a different way, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.<p>I'm not saying that business reasons are the only reasons. I do believe that plenty of people and firms want to change the situation on its merits. It's just also interesting to me to look at this issue from the perspective of business impact.