Gadgetory

joining me its senior writer for cnet seth rosenblatt Seth thanks for being with us thank you so there was an open letter written by a bunch of tech heavyweights that have banded together and it's an open letter to Congress into the President of the United States about security and the the collective sort of group is called reform government surveillance yes tell us what this letter is asking for I mean the title kind of gives it away but right so to summarize that there's a bunch of bullet points in the letter but to summarize these companies are asking the government to be more fair you know according to them in how it requests data from these companies yeah so they want a more oversight they want more safeguards they want more transparency and these are things that technically they've had but because of various rulings in the FISA and surveillance courts over the years have been sort of hamstrung and the government has found ways to circumvent them and these companies are upset and they're not going to take it anymore yep so so why now why are the companies asking for you know limitations I reasonable limitations on the government's powers and abilities in terms of security sure this all goes back to the Edward Snowden document leaks right the documents that he blew the whistle on have really changed the game surveillance as something that is not just talked about people wearing tinfoil hats we've actually found out it's far worse than we could ever have imagined and you know and that involves pretty serious things like various governments from around the world being involved in breaking cryptographic standards and really doing a pretty severe damage to how the internet operates what do you think is going to happen next I mean we were chatting and you said this is sort of like a warning shot right in regards yes absolutely this is this is definitely nothing more than a warning shot I in and of itself there's no teeth but what it does indicate is that these companies that really you know often they get along in some ways but they're always sort of arguing with each other and fighting with each other over we should really mention which company sorry trip idea we've got Apple Twitter my facebook google of course got in google linkedin and AOL so all the big players all the big players are involved they're all agreeing to this and that's a big deal what we're probably going to wind up seeing is nothing in the short term okay but in the long term I wouldn't be surprised if we saw far more lobbying in relation to surveillance in on Capitol Hill and this is also a sign to these companies customers that they are attempting to take steps to protect you it's not something that I would personally put a lot of faith in at the moment okay and no response thus far from the government however the letter was just sort of just released yeah okay as far as customers are concerned there's nothing really that they can do at this point right if they're using the services of any of those companies or the products that any of those companies have put out there they're really just the companies are just letting the customers know hey we're doing this absolutely i mean when the government have figured out how to tap into the internet backbone okay so only so much that you can do and unfortunately you know these these companies are the biggest players and it's hard to find services that are not these companies and i think you bring up a good point about privacy and these companies sort of asking oh sure customers okay give up price there's no small irony in the fact that these are companies that for years have really been pushing people to share more if not actively anti privacy companies and now they're they're taking steps to ensure that if someone's going to use your data it's going to be them mm-hmm it's not the government not to government okay well Seth we will trust that you will keep us informed on this issue thanks so much for inside scoop I'm Sumi das thanks for watching you