Mark Zuckerberg Says The US Has Become A Threat To, Rather Than A Champion For, The Internet

from the indeed dept

Better late than never: it appears that Mark Zuckberberg is finally really pissed off about the NSA surveillance efforts. This comes in the wake of the recent reports that the NSA sought to build a malware empire by setting up a bogus Facebook server to intercept traffic and fool users. While there have been indications that Facebook hasn't been happy about all of this, Zuckerberg has taken to his Facebook page to really dig in, noting that he'd even called President Obama to express his thoughts on the matter.

I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, he notes that the US government has become a threat to the internet:

This is why I've been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government.

The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they're doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.

Earlier this week we wrote about Google's Eric Schmidt directly claiming that the company was attacked by the NSA, and now Zuckerberg is publicly stating that the government has become a threat to the internet. From the very beginning of the Snowden revelations, we've been saying that the tech industry needed to speak out more vehemently about the kind of damage the NSA is doing to a huge part of our economy and the ability to innovate. It's taken some time but it's good to see these companies finally saying this stuff.

Of course, words alone may not do very much. Zuckerberg admits that reform may be a long time coming, but instead is focusing on how the tech industry can build better (read: more encrypted, more secure) systems to fight back against this "threat." Google recently announced that all of its searches are encrypted, but that's just a start. The tech industry has to move to a world where encryption is the norm, and not the exception any more. It may suck in the way that it sucked when homes and cars finally "required" locks, but at this point it's a necessity.