The Internet spying debate begins in earnest

[Commentary] A coalition of Internet firms -- including AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo -- issued a powerful but thoughtful call for reform of government online spying activities. The five principles they put forward are: 1) Limiting Governments’ authority to collect users’ information; 2) Oversight and accountability; 3) Transparency about Government demands; 4) Respecting the free flow of information; and 5) Avoiding conflicts among governments.

Three points are worth making.

• First, the principles laid out by the coalition are hardly radical ones, but rather common sense expressions of rights most Americans surely thought, until recently, they already had. If folks in the national security establishment have problems with any of these, they ought to explain what and why.
• Second, based on what we know, it seems clear that many governments, including our own, have been violating at least some of these principles. The political problem facing the US -- as is so often the case in privacy matters -- is the violation of expectations, which is another way of saying that the US national security establishment appears to have been operating in a political vacuum, either imagining that its surveillance activities (e.g., the NSA’s 1.5 million square foot Utah data storage facility) would never be publicly revealed (Really?), or completely clueless to, and unprepared for, the reaction once they were.
• Third, it would be interesting to assess the list of companies joining the coalition based on two variables: (1) Government contracts as a percentage of revenues; and, (2) Extent of operations in heavily regulated markets.