Shane Harris, Noah Schachtman, and John Hudson report:
Former intelligence officials and technology industry executives reacted with anger and anxiety over the latest revelations that the National Security Agency is reportedly infiltrating some of the world’s biggest technology companies and making off with the private communications of millions of their customers. And if the reports are accurate, it could be very bad news for U.S. technology companies, who have been complaining for months that their government’s secretive intelligence operations are threatening their business and driving customers towards their foreign competitors.
“I think they’re in an almost impossible situation,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, told The Cable.
Read more on ForeignPolicy.com (subscription req.).
In related coverage, Dominic Rushe, Spencer Ackerman and James Ball report the angry reactions from Google and Yahoo:
In a statement, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company was “outraged” by the latest revelations.
“We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide,” he said.
“We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.”
Yahoo said: “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.”
Read more on The Guardian.