The PRISM letter Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft are sending Congress

Trust is necessary for Google's business model. This letter represents a truly minimal attempt at self-preservation. If you truly want to regain you users' trust then you need to be transparent. Who at Google failed to tell the truth until it served their own interests? Who decided to meekly comply rather than taking a stand? Name names. What is going on that we still don't know about? Silence is support.

And frankly, this entire scandal is in part these companies having their chickens come home to roost. Google and Facebook have for years been pushing the culture into accepting that private entities will store and analyze your personal information for profit. How many times has Eric Schmidt publicly said that people need to get over their ideas of personal privacy? Google has played a direct role in changing the expectation of privacy on the internet into one with which the present spying programs are legally defensible. We should demand the government stay out of our business while private corporations are using our data for their own gain and without transparency? You work for a mild-mannered spy agency.

And besides, if what you say is true, how do we know that these companies weren't legally compelled to write this letter to brainwash everyone? It's a drop in the bucket compared to what they were legally compelled to do before. How would we ever know if they will be legally compelled to report wrong numbers?

These companies allowed people with a perverted sense of morality and the law to root through the most private details of our personal lives and our company's. Then they release the most weaselly denial ever contrived, and now this weak excuse for action.

If one man can stand up to the US Gov. risking liberty and life, big businesses certainly can. Google stood by and let it happen. Too often does the world hinges on the actions of one man, in spite of the cowardice of the organised, resourceful and powerful.

As a result, I am disgusted by google, and the others. Yahoo tried, and still try. Why not the all mighty do no evil google?

Remember people, it only takes one man. One single, principled, brave, man. (I am reminded of the central message of Babylon 5)

If you're working at one of these companies that handles millions of peoples data, you'd better learn more empathy for your customers.

The fact that you work at Google and can't understand this is frightening to me.

This is a convenient position to take, which clears Google of any responsibility.

There were companies, smaller than Google, that stood up against government requests to spy on their customers. Quest is one of them. But Google agreed to the terms, "signed papers", and has been cooperating ever since.

More so, Google et al. deliberately lied about commitment to user privacy, which all of the PRISM participants reiterated in their press-releases after Snowden revealed the program.

> I think this letter is a good thing

This letter is a good thing, but little more than good PR.

Releasing statistics on government requests has no implications on the PRISM program, which gives intelligence agencies unhindered access to our data.

I think it's a little unfair to pride oneself as a privacy activist, while spying on your users.

Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. have lost trust because of this whole spying thing. To say that these companies were somehow "victims" is troubling to me. As far as I can tell the Constitution of the U.S.A is the law. Anything introduced to purposely subvert the constitution is illegal and should be challenged.

With companies like Google who have a lot of weight (money) to just hand over anything private to the NSA without actually calling them on it, is disturbing. These NSA programs have been going on for a very long time; collecting everyone's (american AND their allies) private communications. I'm sorry, but victim? No way. Instead of keeping to the "cloud" mentality there could have been more work on protecting users with proper encryption techniques. No body has done this. Yes, Yahoo may have lost in secret, but they also didn't fight the NSA's spying by creating technologies or build upon current technologies to protect their users.

I trusted Google to keep my gmail/youtube/etc. information private for me and those whom I talk to. Advertisements bothered me, yes, so I stopped communicating about confidential things to do with business, etc. I have been a Google user since a week after gmail was introduced.

I have deleted all my connections to Google thanks to these revelations.

In order for Google, Facebook or Microsoft to gain my trust again, there needs to be innovation in the encryption world where I can seamlessly encrypt ON THE CLIENT and decrypt ON THE CLIENT machine with out storing anything to do with the private keys on the cloud or trust Google with the private keys. Would this ever happen? Probably not. Google is an Ad company. Privacy isn't exactly their biggest strong point. Same goes for the others.

If I get to run a quarry on the Gmail servers, scanning through every personal email to find a subset of say 100 people, the statistic that Google want to publish will state that only a 100 peoples account was violated. In truth however, all customers was violated to create the list of the 100 people which account contents got sent over.

Second, Microsoft or Twitter do gain privilege by cooperate with governments. They become less likely a target for lawsuits directed at violations of competition laws. they also get a easier time lobbying politicians for lower taxes if they at the same time are helping out with spying at the local population.

* a helping hand when foreign governments want to close loopholes that allow these companies to dodge local taxes

* useful information about foreign competitors that comes out of the snooping

* government contracts

* ...and much more...

Think about other instances in which the U.S. government "forces" companies into doing things: say a new EPA reg or a new SEC reg. Every such activity is met with a flood of litigation from the companies affected. But here, apparently only Yahoo put up a fight.

It might seem like the DOJ is omnipotent, but really, it's a very budget-constrained and capacity-constrained entity (it's too busy fighting Nancy Reagan's drug war). People need to get their stories consistent on this point: if the government is owned by big evil corporations with lots of money, well the tech industry has plenty of those that can throw their weight and money around.

To be fair, I don't know all of the details, but my gut feeling is that if these companies had wanted to, they could have at least forced the DOJ to spend a lot of money and time getting their cooperation. As a practical matter, not doing so might have been the wrong move even from a business standpoint--each company possibly stands to lose a lot more than they would have had to spend on enough litigation to ruin the DOJ's day.

I'm sure the number of people like Snowden is much less than the number of programs like PRISM. I ask myself frequently, why did I trust these company in the first place, why did I trust them again and again. I guess Snowden is just a flag for "it's time for a change", but when I see your comment, I see no hope, 'cause guys like you, the potential whistleblowers, need these companies to be trusted. I wonder if you've known anything about these before Snowden reveals, if you have, why were you being quiet, if you haven't, how the hell can you trust your employer now?

I see the future, people are willing to sell themselves for a 'better life' based on their privacy. Why? Because some of us are selling it already. But I don't want to be one of them, even I ended up with starving to death.

that's because i can imagine situations (e.g., FBI identify a child trafficker) where i am okay with his privacy being compromised. but I can't for the life of me come up with a scenario where it benefits society to hide these statistics. for crying out loud, tell us how much data you're looking at!

I totally agree this is (belatedly) a step in the right direction, and I'm pleased Google are getting together with other SV companies to question the right of government to extract data at will from their servers, but we don't really know if PRISM was a voluntary program or not at this point, or even what the extent of the surveillance is, because no-one is willing to tell us. So it's hard as a customer to decide where Google stands on this.

Are other companies like Twitter and Amazon cooperating with PRISM? As far as I understand it some companies are cooperating, and some are not, and some like Apple only agreed relatively recently, unlike say Microsoft, Yahoo or Google. The response to the news that they had been cooperating was also a bit odd because rather than siding with their customers and asking for more transparency at that point, the non-denial denials issued told us nothing about what exactly Google have been doing, but lots about what they're not doing in quite specific terms.

The real focus of people's anger should of course be the government which has insisted these companies take part, and refuses to allow any transparency on numbers and methods, but there are lingering suspicions about whether the practices are legal, and whether companies were actually obliged to take part on pain of sanctions, or just strongly encouraged to do so.

But there's a whole different discussion to be had around:

>If it's cooperation, what do they get out of it?

I'm just spit balling here, but tax breaks and favorable legislation are a reasonable first guess. Keep in mind that just like the legal justification for these user data requests, the meetings of the parties involved here (congressmen and company representatives) are not public knowledge. We don't know what benefits are or may be offered.

In fact, we don't know what benefits could be offered. Most of the public--HN included--can't even guess or imagine the benefits that a company would seek in an instance like this. Most of us simply don't have business knowledge at that level, let alone knowledge of the business interests and goals of an individual company as large as Facebook.

So the absence of any of us being able to give a good answer to 'what do they get out of it' is not a good reason to believe that they're not getting something out of it.

We all like to believe in the good of people. But it's our responsibility as the governed, in order to protect our liberty and the liberty of those who follow us, to challenge the actions of the government especially actions on this scale of importance--because we're effectively questioning if the government is already using telecommunications as telescreens.

What do you think of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054532

As a sidenote, think about how efficient copyright advocates have been with this strategy: slowly pushing through seemingly innocent changes.

But that reminds me of one of my favourite series: http://www.amazon.com/Traveler-Fourth-Realm-Trilogy-Book/dp/...

Hah. If they have time to invent self-driving cars, balloon powered internet, and wearable computing devices I'm pretty sure they can spare a few people to invent networking equipment that would save them millions.

That one about "non-denial denials" still seems popular though.

Once someone has failed on this scale, they should never be trusted again.