◼ Zuckerberg Says He Called Obama To Express ‘Frustration’ Over NSA Surveillance. - ◼ Via Instapundit - Andy Greenberg/Forbes
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the first name that comes to mind as a champion of privacy. But the seemingly endless revelations of NSA surveillance programs has inspired Facebook’s founder to call up no less than President Obama himself to defend his users from government intrusion.
On Thursday Zuckerberg posted a statement on Facebook calling on the U.S. government to take more measures to respect users’ privacy and security. “The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat,” reads his statement. “I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.”
Though Zuckerberg never explicitly names the NSA in his statement, his comments follow news of NSA programs that have potentially allowed spying on Facebook users for years–particularly the majority of those users outside the United States. The initial stories on the NSA’s PRISM program last July cited NSA slides that made Facebook appear to have given direct backdoor access to its servers, a notion Zuckerberg and others have vehemently denied. In October, more revelations pointed to NSA efforts to decrypt or surveil data as it traveled between the data centers of companies like Yahoo! and Google. Yet another program siphoned users’ entire contact lists from services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Facebook–NSA documents cited a single day when 82,857 contact lists were taken from Facebook users.
Most recently, the news site the Intercept reported that the NSA ◼ impersonates Facebook servers to infect users’ machines with spyware. image source
