Google Chairman on NSA Spying: ‘We’re Going to Break the Internet’

Google chairman Eric Schmidt lobbed harsh criticism at NSA surveillance on American citizens.

Just because you can do it, doesnt mean you should do it, Schmidt said during a hearing in Palo Alto, Calif. hosted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

The hearing on Wednesday came weeks before a potential Congressional vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill that would stop the NSA from collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens. The event was designed to gin up public support for the legislation while giving Silicon Valley executives a venue to vent about how recent revelations about government spying threaten their businesses.

For years, Sen. Wyden had suggested the NSA was engaged in questionable surveillance practices. But it was not until former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked top-secret documents last year, confirming widespread monitoring of online communications, did the issue gain worldwide attention.

In 2011 on the floor of the United States Senate, I warned that people were going to be stunned and angry when they found out how the U.S. government has been secretly applying its surveillance authority, Sen. Wyden said. And it turned out I was right about that.

The event, held in the gym of Palo Alto High School, was carefully choreographed as an outlet for outrage at government surveillance. Executives were uniformly critical of the NSA, mostly answering softball questions lobbed by Sen. Wyden, who had attended the school long before the Internet industry grew up around it.

The scene, itself, was a bit surreal. Over 100 high school students sat on the basketball court in the bleachers as executives spoke and, at one point, interrupted the proceedings by leaving en masse after the school bell rang to signal the end of a class period.

Joining Schmidt were Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad Smith, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, Dropbox General Counsel Ramsey Homsany and John Lilly, a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners.

Revelations about the surveillance have tarnished the reputations of many Silicon Valley companies. Some documents have suggested that U.S. tech giants were complicit in handing huge amounts of customer information to the federal government, an accusation that the executives vehemently deny. Rather, they say they only respond to legal demands for user data. Any wholesale surveillance, they insist, was done without their help or knowledge.

Whether the companies should even be collecting so much personal data never came up. Digital rights groups have been particularly critical of the practice, saying it leaves users vulnerable.

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Google Chairman on NSA Spying: 'We're Going to Break the Internet'