In what will hopefully be the beginning of a serious push back against the NSA’s lawless invasions of privacy eight major domestic web companies - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Linked In and AOL published an open letter to Barack Obama imploring the feckless U.S. leader to assert control over the surveillance octopus. The letter, yet another embarrassment to the current incarnation of what was at least once in theory a largely “free” country until avaricious greedballs, political charlatans, Wall Street gamblers, unscrupulous corporations and an array of chiseling plutocrats took over. Not that the feckless Obama has the capacity for shame nor is he likely to pay anything other than the usual teleprompter assisted lip service to any sort of serious oversight that could lead to reform will be influenced by the big eight. He has already earned his golden parachute and in a little over three years will retire with full taxpayer funded security, benefits and a future of lucrative speaking gigs joining his predecessors Slick Willie and the Bushes.
While Obama is at this point immune to any serious pressure to call off the dogs and get the surveillane state under control perhaps a better avenue to change would be if those internet giants were to better spend their money on influencing politicians who do have to worry about re-election. A damned good place to start, considering that Silicon Valley corporations should receive better representation would be that disgusting corrupt fat blob of putrefaction that is Senator Dianne Feinstein, the preeminent defender of the NSA. From the very beginning of the revelations made by former government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden it was pretty damned obvious that all of this was inevitably going to harm American business at some point. This has always been a bad deal for U.S. tech giants, especially those heavily invested in cloud based architecture which given the incessant spying of the government cannot be trusted.
As we prepare to enter 2014 -despite the head in the sand vision of the United States of America that so many of the citizenry are taught to believe -an increasingly global world and the failure of those domestic corporations to guarantee a secure venue for communications, business operations is going to drive serious businesses to countries that do not have a massive state vacuum cleaner sweeping up every conversation, email, financial transaction, web query and keystroke into massive data storage facilities. This is no longer an atmosphere that is in any way conducive to doing business, the corruption, cheating, crony capitalism and government support of financial markets were bad enough, the failure to provide proper security is over the long term going to be absolutely devastating to the tech industry in The Homeland.
From today’s open letter to Barry imploring him to implement some control over his NSA goons it is pretty apparent that the corporate leadership is already experiencing the pain of getting bitten in the ass by the hostile fascist takeover that was set into motion on the morning of September 11, 2001.
The companies have created a website as a part of their “Reform Government Surveillance” campaign. According to a Reuters story Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith has stated it plainly on the site that “People don’t use technology they don’t trust” and “Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it”. You can pretty much rest assured that the boys over at American Stasi Commandant Keith Alexander’s Star Trek themed command center are busily combing through the accumulated history of Mr. Brad Smith today. I hope that he doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet for the sake of the this effort to challenge corrupt entrenched power because when it comes to future profits being squandered by an out of control big government agency this could very well to turn out to be war with the looming battles being waged in the nation’s courts.
This could end up being in the words of this Guardian piece a "game changer" now that the NSA revelations have gone beyond offending the powerless peasants and now must deal with a unified threat from companies with more money than God and the legal wherewithal to sue the hell out of the bastards.
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