US-based technology providers have allied against government snooping, taking an active stance resisting what they describe as over-reaching government surveillance, and calling for reform of the laws and practices regulating surveillance. The alliance includes Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Twitter, AOL, and LinkedIn.
Several of the members are doing more than simply calling for reform, and are now actively taking steps to keep government agencies at bay.
A National Security Agency programme, dubbed "Muscular" was recently exposed, which extracts users' data from cloud services by attacking the links between data centres. Google, Microsoft and others responded with horror to this disclosure, and moved swiftly to improve security by encrypting their backbone traffic and tightening controls on user data, but executives at both firms have expressed concerns that such aggressive snooping will further dampen cloud adoption in the market, as well as raising costs.
Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, came out all guns blazing in the wake of the Muscular disclosure, describing government snooping as an "advanced persistent threat" against Internet users.
Advanced persistent threat, or APT, is a term used to describe a particularly egregious form of attack, waged by a motivated, resourced and focused adversary. The term has been used to describe the Stuxnet campaign against the Iranian nuclear programme, and Mandiant, when it uncovered evidence of Chinese military hacking against US targets, labelled the group "APT1". For a US company to use the term to describe its own government is a strong indicator of just how deeply the firm is concerned about the implications for its business.
"In particular, recent press stories have reported allegations of governmental interception and collection - without search warrants or legal subpoenas - of customer data as it travels between customers and servers or between company data centres in our industry," Smith wrote. "If true, these efforts threaten to seriously undermine confidence in the security and privacy of online communications."
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