I'll repaste a comment I made elsewhere, that seems applicable here:
If a company is approached by any spooky three-letter agency, the higher-ups of that company could possibly interpret that as a validation that they've made it 'big' -- and furthermore, they could see in that offer a security that three-letter agencies then have an interest in seeing the company continue to scale up and succeed (because of limited funds, three-lettered agencies can't just go merrily creating tools that work properly with the 'next facebook' every other 9 months... and furthermore, there's no knowing if they'll come across resistance when they solicit 'direct access' to the next company. Also, NSA would have just loved it if China and Russia was a big user of Facebook... so I can even imagine them doing something subtle to try to make that a reality).
Sadly, I do not see this trend ending anytime soon.
Indeed. That gives new emphasis to the notion of regulatory capture, wherein the regulatory agency has a vested interest in the continued success of its regulated clients. In this scenario, in a manner of speaking, the agency is seeking to be "captured," so that it can continue to leech lifeblood from the host.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how-the-u.s-fo...
"The government has a lot of leverage," including contracts and licenses, said a representative for an Internet company. "There is a lot of pressure from them. Nobody is willingly going into this."
The reciprocal, my Internet company will spy on my users in exchange for a government contract, wouldn't be called leverage, it'd be called corruption.
That might be logical, by some chain of reasoning, but it's not reasonable. To boycott them would mean to disconnect yourself from the internet -- impractical for many. Even if you live in a privileged zone with smaller ISPs available, your data still transits through these companies. By cutting yourself off, you forego giving them some miniscule amount of money, but you also disconnect yourself from news and the ability to communicate and organize with others who feel the same.
I think that the damage is already too great. They are probably already in all the hubs, exchanges and its not like they will give them back. It's no surprise that they are collecting all the cell data too, whether it be metadata or content. Who knows what kinda stuff they have in the actual hardware beside the repeaters they have on the fiber cables.
My question is how do we enact a change. The genaral public (non-tech people) may not fully understand the implications of what they are doing and how much of our data thy are taking. If the large companies are just going to bend over how do we do something?
It seems like end to end encryption is the only way to go. It makes the UX not as convenient, but convenience is the carrot that has led us to this dismal point.
But more seriously, the only healthy basis for a way out I see is to make literally every part of the "stack" open and transparent. "Open" as in "open source", both regarding hardware and software.
> AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Comcast, and Sprint declined to comment.