“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime,” said Balzac. This certainly applies to Silicon Valley complicity with the national security state.
The NSA documents that Snowden leaked clearly show the sickening complicity of Silicon Valley and Microsoft with the national security state. For all practical purposes, big tech are appendages spying on us for the NSA. Many of those who started these companies have become billionaires. What’s a little shredding of the Constitution and ratting out those who trust you when you can get rich! This certainly does give lie to the tired mantra of scrappy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with a vision working 70 hour weeks to build a company. The reality appears to be that too many of these companies simply sold out to the NSA, with its implied promises of big contracts, governmental juice, and data sharing. The genuinely disturbing thing is none of them put up a fight. And they could have.
Zero Hedge mocks Microsoft’s feeble response to Snowden’s disclosure that they allowed NSA to bypass encryption on Outlook and Skype.
The firm’s General Counsel Brad Smith posted on MSFT’s blog that, guess what, the world’s biggest desktop OS maker doesn’t give government data encryption keys or customer data. Well… what else were they going to say? Oh yes, repeat “direct access” 6 times in a blog post, making it all too clear the whole issue is merely about semantics.
Hey, did you hear that Google wants floating balloons in the sky to expand Internet access? Before Snowden, I would have applauded this. However, now it seems just another way for Silicon Valley to monitor us for the NSA while pretending to do no evil.