Skip to Main Content
We Have Root
book

We Have Root

by Bruce Schneier
September 2019
Beginner content levelBeginner
304 pages
8h 22m
English
Wiley
Content preview from We Have Root

6Privacy and Surveillance

Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet

Originally published in CNN.com, July 31, 2013

In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype—owned by Microsoft—was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company’s blog to deny it.

Turns out that wasn’t quite true.

Or at least he—or the company’s lawyers—carefully crafted a statement that could be defended as true while completely deceiving the reader. You see, Skype wasn’t changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, because the government was already able to eavesdrop on users.

At a Senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn’t collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word “collect,” an excuse that didn’t even pass the laugh test.

As Edward Snowden’s documents reveal more about the NSA’s activities, it’s becoming clear that we can’t trust anything anyone official says about these programs.

Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no “direct access” to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers.

Apple says it’s never heard of PRISM. Of course not; that’s the internal name of the NSA database. Companies are publishing reports ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Reinventing the Organization for GenAI and LLMs

Reinventing the Organization for GenAI and LLMs

Ethan Mollick
Lead Yourself to Success

Lead Yourself to Success

Alan Chambers, MBE
Extraordinary Women with Cameras

Extraordinary Women with Cameras

Vanessa Perez, Darcy Reed

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119643012Purchase book