Google’s canned responses to reports of government spying have ranged from “concerned” to “outraged.” But some of its employees have been more outspoken.
One of Google’s top lawyers testified before Congress Wednesday about surveillance, demanding urgent reform of email privacy laws and warning of threats to the open Internet and to the United States economy. Meanwhile, Google engineers who work on security railed against the government online.
The backlash against government Internet surveillance could hurt the United States economy, partly because businesses and consumers could abandon United States cloud companies, said Richard Salgado, the director for law enforcement and information security at Google, in testimony before the Senate judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law.
He cited studies like one from Forrester that predicted the cloud computing industry could lose $180 billion, 25 percent of its revenue, by 2016.
Already, countries like Brazil are considering so-called data localization laws, which would require that all data related to Brazilian companies and citizens be stored in Brazil. This movement “has gained considerable traction since the revelation of the Prism program,” Mr. Salgado said, and added that companies like Google “could be barred from doing business in one of the world’s most significant markets.”
There is also a movement to give control of the Internet to the United Nations or to individual governments, Mr. Salgado said, posing “a significant threat to the free and open Internet.”
Mr. Salgado, who previously worked in the Justice Department, pushed for reform of surveillance laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which does not require a warrant to read e-mail more than 180 days old, giving it less protection than letters in a file cabinet. And he reiterated demands for the government to allow Google to publish details on the numbers of national security requests it receives.
In an unofficial capacity, Google engineers have also spoken out. In a sharply worded post on Google Plus that included an unprintable profanity aimed at the National Security Agency, Brandon Downey, who has worked on Google security for a decade, wrote that while he had suspected government spying on Google users’ data, the revelations saddened him.
“The U.S. has to be better than this; but I guess in the interim, that security job is looking a lot more like a Sisyphus thing than ever,” Mr. Downey wrote.
Mike Hearn, another Google security engineer, wrote that one of the leaked N.S.A. slides showed an anti-hacking system he worked on for two years.
“We designed this system to keep criminals out. There’s no ambiguity here,” he wrote.
“In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done – build more secure software,” he added.
An earlier version of this post misstated the first mention of several public Google Plus posts by Google engineers. Other people mentioned the posts online, before The Desk blog.