A U.S. board that will tell Congress whether surveillance programs violate civil liberties wants to hear from companies including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on what data and access to servers they’ve given the government.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, appointed by President Barack Obama, is reviewing the scope of National Security Agency spy programs and will recommend whether new controls are needed to curb the government’s surveillance authority.
Meetings with Internet and telecommunications companies will “shed light” on how they respond to orders to turn over data and whether the NSA has overreached, David Medine, the board’s chairman, said in a phone interview July 16.
A security camera is mounted near the Google Inc. China headquarters in Beijing. (Bloomberg)
“It’s valuable to hear company perspectives on how the programs operate,” Medine said. “We want to hear both sides of it. We want to hear the government side but we also want to hear the private-sector side.”
Medine said he decided to request meetings with companies and trade associations that weren’t asked to participate in the board’s first public meeting after Bloomberg News inquired about the panel’s work.
The board was dormant for six years and came to life when Medine was sworn in May 29, eight days before publication of the first news stories based on documents leaked by contractor Edward Snowden about secret NSA programs.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, Facebook Inc., based in Menlo Park, California, and other companies should be allowed to clarify what they’ve given the NSA under court order, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast. (
A coalition of companies, privacy advocates and trade groups sent a letter Thursday to Obama and congressional leaders asking permission for Internet and telephone companies to publish the number and types of U.S. data requests they receive.
The 63 organizations that signed included Google, Facebook and Apple Inc.; non-profit privacy watchdogs the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and trade groups the Computer and Communications Industry Association and the Internet Association.
The privacy board was created by federal law to ensure U.S. spy programs don’t infringe citizen privacy. It will provide a report to Congress that may include recommendations to alter surveillance programs.
The board on July 2 met with executives from Apple, based in Cupertino, California, for about an hour, Medine said. Apple, which requested the meeting, was one of the companies cited in reports by The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers as participating in the NSA program, known as Prism.
“We requested a meeting with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to strongly advocate for greater transparency about the national security-related requests we receive from the government,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said in an email. “Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data.”
The meeting helped the board get “a better sense of how the program operates,” Medine said. He declined to further comment or say which other companies he’s contacted.
Obama, facing criticism from privacy advocates and some lawmakers that NSA programs violate citizen rights, has described the board as a counterweight to spy programs.
Apple, Google and Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, have asked the Justice Department for permission to clarify what they do and don’t disclose to the NSA.
Hearing from the companies, even if it has to be in private, would help the board understand the breadth of the surveillance operations, rather than relying on the Obama administration’s description, Ashkan Soltani, an independent technology researcher who testified before the panel this month, said in an email.
“It’s not clear how the oversight board can determine whether the government complied with the relevant legal authorities if they do not consult with the companies that were required to turn over user data,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington, in an email.
Microsoft doesn’t provide direct access to emails, instant messages or Skype calls and refuses to grant agencies the ability to break its encryption, Brad Smith, general counsel for the company, wrote in a blog July 16.
