Silicon Valley has been largely speaking out as of late against the United States government’s controversial surveillance programs, but some say the nation’s top cyber firms are scared that their own abilities to collect info could soon be eroded.

Months into the ongoing and always heated debate about the US
National Security Agency’s spy operations, President Barack Obama
said last December that he had appointed a small panel of experts
to assess the NSA programs in question that had been exposed
after former contractor Edward Snowden started to disclose
classified documents earlier that year. That review group has
since presented a few dozen recommendations to the White House,
and last month Pres. Obama asked Congress to
codify into law changes concerning the way that the US government
gets access to certain sensitive records — namely the telephony
metadata created by telecommunication companies and currently
gathered in bulk by the NSA, as exposed by Mr. Snowden.

In January, however, the president also said a separate group
would reach out to privacy experts, technologists and business
leaders to inspect the way that “big data” is created, collected
and used by both the public and private sector, and “whether
we can forge international norms on how to manage this data and
how we can continue to promote the free flow of information in
ways that are consistent with both privacy and security.”

Ultimately, Obama said at the time, “[W]hat’s at stake in
this debate goes far beyond a few months of headlines or passing
tensions in our foreign policy.”

Now this week in the National Journal, reporter Brendan Sasso
writes that “Google is getting
nervous” over what the president had to say.

“On the one hand, the Internet behemoth wants the public to
know it’s outraged by US surveillance programs and is
aggressively lobbying for new rules to keep its customers’ data
safe from the government’s prying eyes,” Sasso wrote.
“But as public attention turns to data privacy, Google,
Facebook, Yahoo and other tech giants want to be sure that their
own data-gathering practices don’t get lumped in with the federal
spying programs that are the target of popular ire.”

Indeed, the giants of Silicon Valley — even some of the ones
implicated in certain NSA spy programs, according to Snowden’s
leaks — have spoken up about alleged counterterrorism
intelligence-gathering practices perpetrated by the NSA that
routinely sacrifice the privacy of the world’s wired population
in exchange for supposed national security for some. At the same
time, however, some — including Google — have earned reputations
for not exactly valuing customer data as being something sacred
or sensitive. In court documents filed by the search engine giant
last year surrounding a class action lawsuit concerning the
company’s automated scanning of messages sent through its Gmail
service, Google said “Indeed, ‘a person has no legitimate
expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over
to third parties.’” And while the CEO of Facebook may have
recently lashed out publically at Pres. Obama over the NSA’s
activities, the social networking site has been scrutinized
heavily over their own issues regarding privacy in the past, and
just this year were sued for allegedly monitoring its user’s private
messages.

When leaked NSA documents suggested last year that the US had
been tapping into information sent between Google’s
datacenters in an unencrypted state, however, the search
company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said it was
“outrageous.” Then when disclosure made last month
accused the NSA of masquerading as Facebook in order to trick
targets and take over their computers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg
said he was “confused and frustrated by .
. . the behavior of the US government.” Another remark made
by the social networking star in a statement published last month
— that “The US government should be the champion for the
internet, not a threat”—was all but echoed by other leading
websites and tech experts who blamed the country’s behavior for
undermining the very infrastructure of the ‘net.

But with “big data” being brought into the Obama administration’s
crosshairs too now, Sasso says those same companies are saying
“Leave us out of your spying fight.” And some, he added
for an article published by the Journal on Tuesday this week, say
there is “widespread frustration with the White House”
because of both big data and the NSA’s operations being examined
at once.

“Companies have very specific relationships with their users,
and they tell them what they’re doing with their data,” one
unnamed technology industry lobbyist said to Sasso.

On his part, Sasso succinctly summarized the difference between
the public and private sector’s information gathering in just two
sentences:

“Tech companies are lobbying against NSA spying because they
worry it could undermine trust in their services,” he said.
“But they depend on the ability to harvest data about users
to target advertising and to provide other services,”

John Podesta — the Obama administration counselor tasked by the
president in January to review big data technologies — said
during an address at University of California-Berkley this month
that “Big Data requires us to ask ourselves, how do we
embrace new technologies and the progress they bring to our
society, while at the same time protecting our fundamental
freedoms and values, like privacy, fairness and
self-determination?”

“[T]he legal and policy questions that these technologies
raise are quite old,” Berkley’s newspaper quoted Podesta as saying.

“In the midst of what some are calling a Big Data
revolution,” he said, “we’re taking this opportunity to
consider the landscape, and to really interrogate whether our
existing policies are prepared for what’s on the horizon
technologically.”

Now according to Sasso, Silicon Valley is shaking because —
despite being assured by his anonymous tech source that comparing
the NSA with big data is on par with assessing “apples and
oranges”— the cyber companies that collect personal
information for reasons other than alleged national security
could soon lose their ability to harvest data as well.

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