Washington When Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants united in outrage last summer over the National Security Agencys unfettered spying, telecommunications giants such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint whose customers are also the targets of secret government spying remained noticeably mum.
But now the phone companies are speaking up. In closed-door meetings with policymakers they are taking a less accommodating stance with government and rattling the historically tight bond between telecom and the surveillance community.
Its been extremely unusual for telecoms to resist any requests from the government, said software engineer Zaki Manian of Palo Alto, who advocates against mass government surveillance.
The telecom companies have a long history of providing raw data dumps to the government and typically taking some money in return and calling it a day, Manian said.
Technology companies typically comply with requests for information about individual users but resist demands for bulk data. But telecommunications companies share a connection with government unlike any other industry.
They have been tied to our national security agencies for all of their history, said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who was a special assistant to President Obama for science and technology policy.
Since the earliest days of wiretapping in the late 19th century, telephone companies have assisted law enforcement and intelligence agencies. For decades, a series of laws cemented the relationship.
But 2014 marks a pivotal moment for the telecom industry. White House policymakers are considering significant changes as public debate about surveillance heightens in the aftermath of NSA spying exposed by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The central pillar of Obamas plan to overhaul the surveillance programs calls for shifting storage of phone data from the government to telecom companies or an independent third party. But telecoms dont want that job.
Now phone industry executives are privately telling administration officials they dont like the idea of storing phone records gathered by the NSA because they dont want to become the governments data minders. Companies say they are wary of being forced to standardize their own data collection to conform to the NSAs needs.
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Telecoms Resist NSA Plan