NSA surveillance: tech companies demand sweeping changes to US laws

Sure they could. In fact, these companies are in a much better position than Lavabit to spit it back in big government's face...financially, legally, and politically.

But I agree that this is a positive development.

While that may be true, it's not really the same situation.

For one thing, it seems clear that the behaviour in question was illegal, and people are going to jail for it.

For another, guessing that someone won't have changed the default PIN to access their voicemail is not on the same technical level as, say, building backdoors into widely used hardware by being sneaky with state-of-the-art mathematics.

I'm definitely not disputing that. I also believe that the current state of affairs isn't OK.

What I am disputing is the notion that companies are somehow defending our privacy rights. No they're not. Microsoft, Google and Facebook not only do not battle for consumer rights, their entire damn businesses are based on eroding them as much as possible. If they could have legally collected the data NSA was collecting, they'd have done so without as much as batting an eye.

All they're doing in this context is trying to shift public outcry from their own dubious practices, for two reasons:

1. As people start sharing less and less personal data for fear of government surveillance, they're also sharing less and less personal data with the tech companies themselves. This means less personal data to sell and, consequently, less profits.

2. Average consumers typically don't notice how much of their data is in fact shared with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The NSA scandal put this into a new perspective: they share enough data that even the government cares. The PR folks aren't stupid; they are predictably trying to shift public outcry towards the NSA, attempting to create the image that somehow these companies -- which otherwise deeply care for their users' privacy -- have done the best they could to protect the private data of their customers, and now need support to battle against this Bigger Enemy. Conveniently, the fact that they can still tap unlimited information for their own use is shielded away.

I'm not denying surveillance laws need to be changed, I'm simply denying the benevolent role of large corporations.

And so they ensure that the cycle keeps going around, without any opportunity for real change.

In my experience, people are quite broadly happy with the status quo. The complain incessantly about it, but very few would change it in a really fundamental way. It's hard to look at the American government and see it as anything other than an expression of the composite of American voters: financially irresponsible baby boomers who carry with them some of the liberal leanings of being teenagers in the 1960's along with the paranoia of being young adults in the Cold War.

This drives people who actually oppose the status quo in a fundamental way absolutely crazy.