Put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical progressive tech company. You receive a letter from the government asking you to copy all your network traffic to t

Put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical progressive tech company. You receive a letter from the government asking you to copy all your network traffic to the NSA for analysis. Threatening serious jail time if you resist or reveal the existence of the letter. Your lawyers say all that appears to be legal and legitimate, and informal discussions with other tech executives reveal that everybody in your industry does it and it's no big deal. It takes a lot of courage to resist. Now that the scope of the surveillance has been revealed, and it's become clear that most of the technology culture, and a big chunk of the general public, is on your side. And the risk of consequences like jail time is much less if you're no longer talking about the government's specific activities in your case, but things that have been published in major newspapers. It suddenly becomes a lot easier to make a strong statement. > Elsevier getting involved with supporting Open Access That's not a fair comparison at all. Open access to scientific research would totally kill Elsevier's main revenue source. The main revenue source for e.g. Google or Verizon is customers, not the NSA. Surveillance reform wouldn't kill their primary business models.