Mark Zuckerberg joins Mayer in hitting back at critics of tech companies, saying US government did ‘bad job’ of balancing people’s privacy and duty to protect
Dominic Rushe
The Guardian [UK]
11 September 2013
Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook struck back on Wednesday at critics who have charged tech companies with doing too little to fight off NSA surveillance. Mayer said executives faced jail if they revealed government secrets.
Yahoo and Facebook, along with other tech firms, are pushing for the right to be allowed to publish the number of requests they receive from the spy agency. Companies are forbidden by law to disclose how much data they provide.
During an interview at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mayer was asked why tech companies had not simply decided to tell the public more about what the US surveillance industry was up to. “Releasing classified information is treason and you are incarcerated,” she said…
…[Zuckerberg] said after the news broke in the Guardian and the Washington Post about Prism, the government surveillance programme that targets major internet companies: “The government response was, ‘Oh don’t worry we are not spying on any Americans.’ Oh wonderful that’s really helpful to companies that are trying to serve people around the world and that’s really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies.”
“I thought that was really bad,” he said. Zuckerberg said Facebook and others were pushing successfully for more transparency. “We are not at the end of this. I wish that the government would be more proactive about communicating. We are not psyched that we had to sue in order to get this and we take it very seriously,” he said…
The complete article is at The Guardian.
