NSA spying will shatter the internet, Silicon Valley bosses warn

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Top Silicon Valley execs have warned that the NSA's continued surveillance of innocent people will rupture the internet which is bad news for business.

Oh, and bad news for hundreds of thousands of workers, and America's moral authority, too.

The suits were speaking at a roundtable organized by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) in Palo Alto, California, on Wednesday. Google's chairman Eric Schmidt and John Lilly, a partner at venerable VC firm Greylock Partners, were on the panel, along with Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith and his counterpart at Facebook, Colin Stretch, and Dropbox, Ramsey Homsany.

"It is time to end the digital dragnet, which harms American liberty and the American economy without making the country safer. The US government should stop requiring American companies to participate in the suspicionless collection of their customers data, and begin the process of rebuilding trust both at home and abroad," said Senator Wyden.

"The United States here in Silicon Valley, up in the Silicon Forest of the State of Oregon that I am so proud to represent, and in tech campuses and garage start-ups across the country has the best technologies and the best ideas to drive high-tech innovation. It is policy malpractice to squander that capital for no clear security gain."

The assembled speakers echoed Wyden's sentiments, and agreed that unless the US government reined in its intelligence agencies, American business would suffer badly.

"The simplest outcome [of NSA spying] is that we end up breaking the internet," Google's Schmidt said.

"What's going to happen is that governments will bring in bad laws and say 'we want our own internet and we dont want to work with others.' The cost of that is huge to knowledge and science, and has huge implications."

Schmidt said he had spent the summer in Germany talking to, among others, Chancellor Angela Merkel. She had told him of her youth growing up in East Germany and said that the knowledge that the NSA were listening to her calls to her mother reminded her of chilling Cold War surveillance.

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NSA spying will shatter the internet, Silicon Valley bosses warn