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Among other things, this is the tipping point for how Snowden will be viewed. If all these powerful companies agree, in an unprecedented show of unanimity, tha

• teamgb 13y ago
  Not once does the name "Edward Snowden" appear anywhere on the web-page or open letter! These companies are simply grand-standing to further their own ambition. They don't care what happens to Snowden, they deny even his very existence.
  • Smerity 13y ago
    Edward Snowden isn't mentioned, no, but it's largely due to him that the debate and recent revelations have been so heavily discussed by so many. We'd known about strange telecommunication interception by governments for years[1] but Snowden's disclosures and the following saga brought it to the attention of the world by providing a theatrical backdrop for the media to start using. Now it's something that normal people know about, not just techies. Regulating government surveillance is the issue these companies are best positioned to support. If they'd explicitly mentioned Snowden, the discussion could quickly be derailed. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A and many more
  • pg 13y ago
    They may not all care what happens to Snowden, but I think it's unfair to say they're merely showing off. I think these companies are acting on pretty high principle. They have little to gain by issuing such a statement, except the goodwill of people like us, but since they're all participating, such goodwill is evenly distributed and no one of them derives an advantage from it. Whereas they all depend on good relations with various bits of the federal government, which they risk offending with this statement.
    • teamgb 13y ago
      The crux of the issue for Snowden is whether he is viewed by the public as a whistle-blower or traitor. These companies have staked out a position, off the back of his endeavors, yet lack the courage and conviction to fully support him. It makes me cringe to see Larry Page, Marissa Mayer et al posting weasel words on a web-site, as though they are champions of the people. In the week that Nelson Mandela passed away, the contrast between giants and dwarves could not be clearer.
      • trekky1700 13y ago
        Snowden didn't do this for publicity or to be grand-standed, he did it because he believed it was right. I think he would agree that he is not the issue people should be discussing. Instead, it should be how to fix the problems he brought to light.
      • ggreer 13y ago
        These companies want the conversation to be about surveillance, not Snowden. Had Snowden been mentioned in the letter, it would have set off a distracting debate. They probably appreciate what he did, but publicly thanking Snowden isn't going to help them achieve their goals.
        • rdl 13y ago
          Snowden is also not the only whistleblower. To some extent, the more-limited actions by Binney, Wiebe, and Drake were even more amazing because they were without precedent (at NSA); Snowden went far beyond them, but had their example in mind.
    • neilk 13y ago
      They have a lot to gain. Many analysts are saying that surveillance, or the perception of complicity with it, is going to lose international customers and have other negative effects on business partnerships. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/how-nsa-mass-surveillance-hurting-us-economy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/how-nsa-mass-surveilla... I agree that for the most part, geeks at these companies are as opposed to surveillance as people outside - probably even more so. However, usually, it's business impact that turns private opinion into official corporate policy.
• friism 13y ago
  I feel the same way, and have also been hoping for internet companies to put a stake in the ground. On the other hand, it frustrates me that the tipping point for how Snowden's legacy will be viewed is action by a set of corporations, and not action by elected officials, the media, or an informed public...
  • adventured 13y ago
    That may end up being the view, but in fact it is the people behind these corporations making the decisions. Given this is the United States Military waging an espionage offensive on domestic soil (as well as internationally), I regard it as a brave effort for anyone at any of these companies to stand up and push back.
  • thaumasiotes 13y ago
    I kind of like it. It's a nice blow to the straw viewpoint that corporations should have no rights to speak. Everything these companies say is informed by discussion in the media, among the public, and, yes, with elected officials. The line you want to draw is extremely fuzzy at best in reality. I have read that Genghis Khan's original plan after conquering China was to raze the farming villages to provide more pasture for horses (and the Mongols that horse populations supported). Some bureaucrats pointed out to him that he could personally do better by taxing the Chinese farmers. And he sold out the Mongols to do it, which worked out great for him and the millions of peasants he didn't kill. Do we count that as action by the peasants, who held essentially zero formal power, or by the mandarins, who could never have afforded to pay for the deal themselves?
    • 001sky 13y ago
      the straw viewpoint that corporations should have no rights to speak But the CEO's also have a moral obligation to lead. Frankly, they have this obligation even if its not in the financial (narrow) interest of their company. Although what we are clearly seeing here is the 'existential' threat not only to their business models, but that <history> will view them as compllicit in a bad thing, imho.
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• wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
  There is one thing missing from this text so far, the answer to "or what?"
• thaumasiotes 13y ago
  This is a fulcrum for how Snowden is viewed by the populace; I find it all too easy to imagine the government symbolically caving in to this cause while still forcing Snowden personally to live out his life as a political refugee from the United States hiding from charges that never quite go away. And yes, getting imprisoned makes you less credible in the eyes of the public; people love a winner. :/
  • zymhan 13y ago
    I never really considered that I would see in my lifetime two people be persecuted so strongly by the government for doing such a beneficial thing. This seems like more "1950's over-zealous anticommunism".
  • mcphilip 13y ago
    My cynical prediction is that the government will symbolically cave on bulk surveillance whilst doing a massive knowledge and expertise transfer to an ally with a populace not so troubled by surveillance. The process for searching through bulk data will just have an extra step where the US sends requests for intelligence data to their ally who can then lawfully search bulk communication data.
    • patrickk 13y ago
      Indeed it's happened before. The Bush-era 'Total Information Awareness' program (someone really dropped the ball branding that one), got shelved supposedly, but in reality was changed or continued under different programs or names.
• ma2rten 13y ago
  Maybe, I am naive, but I'd like to believe that if Snowden had been captured, he would become a martyr and people would be on the streets now. Eventually the movement would grow strong enough that the big companies would join in.
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • joering2 13y ago
    Not true. People won't be on the streets unless the gov actions directly affects their lives in the ways too grave to ignore anymore. Manning disclosed that US military was killing civilians basically for fun [1], and yet no people were protesting on the streets (not in large numbers, at least) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogFZlRiTHuw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogFZlRiTHuw
• ma2rten 13y ago
  Maybe, I am naive, but I'd like to believe that if Snowden had been captured, he would become a martyr and people would be on the streets now. Eventually the movement would grow strong enough that the big companies would join in.
• timbro 13y ago
  Why focus on Snowden again? The fact of the matter is: We have clearly seen that the governments have been lying to us the whole time. And of course they will ultimately make some promises. But it's too late for promises. Nobody trusts the governments anymore. Their degree of corruption is painfully obvious. As long as there are agencies like the NSA/CIA with the insane budgets we give them, the abuse will continue (best case: it will be slowed down temporarily).
• salemh 13y ago
  PG is effortlessly politic (neutral), which geneartes hot button conversation. Leading to interesting discourse. (I have no point, outside of the social ramifications of chatting at a bar with dudes/chica's about nothing).
• shin_lao 13y ago
  This is most likely a fake web site.
  • adventured 13y ago
    No. For example, Microsoft put out a public press release touting it.
• mrobot 13y ago
  "Tipping point for how Snowden will be viewed"? This? They did it for us? Yuck. I share the sentiment of some others here that i'd rather see human beings fight and win in this battle, not the faces of some bottom lining marketing machines protecting their product. A human product that lets its product owner tip the scales and control its future? Puke. Double puke. The sooner this privacy debate ends for them the better. I'd rather the debate continue and we develop better technology and opinions around ownership of our own actions and lives so we harden ourselves from parasitism, instead of cheering when one of our parasites takes out another.
• hooande 13y ago
  There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. Government surveillance has become a political wedge issue, similar to abortion. No one likes it or encourages it but people have strong emotions on both sides. Snowden is deserving of credit, he may have helped to spark another enduring and polarizing american social debate. It's unfortunate that he won't be around for the resulting legal process. It's worth noting that the modern surveillance state didn't begin when Edward Snowden stepped in front of a camera for the first time. Where were these responsible tech giants five or ten years ago? When everyone in the country was flipping the heck out over 9/11, some of these companies went along with the crowd and gave the government access to everything. Their points are very valid, more government transparency and accountability is always good. But courage is about doing the thing when it's hard, not when it's easy. It's good to see movement in the right direction but it would have been nice if things had gotten to this point sooner. Then maybe Snowden would still be sleeping in his own bed.
  • asuffield 13y ago
    Two of them didn't exist ten years ago, and half of them would have been entirely unaware of the surveillance problem because they were too small to be targets. It's looking increasingly like Google didn't know until Snowden told them - they were just straight-up compromised by a hostile attacker breaking into their networks. So I can't blame most of them for not doing anything sooner.
  • justin66 13y ago
    > There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this country will always see Snowden as a traitor. Let's break this down. You'd have to: not know the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union not know that Russia wasn't where Snowden was trying to end up not understand the difference between a political defector (defecting to a political system that doesn't exist anymore!) and a guy trying to evade prosecution I don't say this very often but I don't think people are as dumb as you think they are. People who think Snowden is a traitor would feel the same if he were in Iceland or something right now.
• DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  I came down pretty hard on Manning, but Snowden is a hero. It's one thing to declare war on secrecy itself by dumping everything you can find. It's something else to release narrowly-targeted material solely for the purpose of pointing out to the voters that their government is lying to them. That's heroic in my book.
  • joering2 13y ago
    Manning is a hero, and its okay to down-vote this post.
    • wavefunction 13y ago
      I upvoted it as I agree.
• tokenadult 13y ago
  If all these powerful companies agree, I wonder, empirically, to what degree this whole problem shows that these companies are even powerful. I think some observers have concluded, after the revelations about internal NSA documents claiming to be able to monitor internal server-to-server communications in the big tech companies, that the companies are weak. It also appears to be beyond dispute that some NSA practices were known in the industry for a long time but the companies didn't lobby about those directly to Congress. in an unprecedented show of unanimity I think these tech companies, in various combinations, have lobbied in concert before. How long those combinations last depends in part on how unified their interests really are when the details of regulations are drafted. The current call to action is "we hereby call on governments to endorse the following principles and enact reforms that would put these principles into action." Not all of the HN readers are unanimous even on the broad outlines of the principles, as the comments kindly submitted below your comment show, and anyone familiar with national government legislative and regulatory processes knows that the devil is in the details, as one webpage of bullet point policy goals gets changed into dozens of pages of national laws, international treaties, and administrative regulations. All that said, I fully agree that it is very significant that the companies in the industry are speaking up, and I think that will do a lot to move legislative and regulatory reform of NSA surveillance programs. I agree with other commenters to your comment that it will be a good idea to help consumers have reliable products and services to ensure their own privacy on an individual basis and to regulate how private business corporations gather data on Internet users as well.
• x0x123 13y ago
  Agreed.
• samstave 13y ago
  Curious, PG, how do you personally reconcile Silicon Valley's participation in the Surveillance State? E.G. Palantir's tech, possibly, being core to some of the capabilities - and by extension, VCs such as Peter Thiel's support of such companies... Its such a complex issue, I think, for this industry; Strive to make incredible technologies, hope they are used for good. Do you have any thoughts on this?
• eggspurt 13y ago
  Snowden with NSA should be considered to be white hat hackers: they demonstrated the inadequacy of private information protection by Google and other companies https://medium.com/p/1bcff7c0f25f https://medium.com/p/1bcff7c0f25f
• deleted 13y ago
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