By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter are engaged in a costly tech arms race, with their businesses and cultures at stake. Not against one another, mind you, but a common foe: the National Security Agency.
A man looks at his cellphone as he walks on the street in downtown Madrid. (Photo: Francisco Seco, AP)
The tech juggernauts are investing in security technology, lobbying efforts and good old-fashioned PR to thwart U.S. government snooping of their data systems, often without their cooperation or knowledge.
For months, the narrative has focused on data breaches and spying as tech’s biggest players quietly stewed over a sense of government betrayal, while assessing threats to their brands because of consumer outrage over invasion of their privacy. The breaches, and their threat to company reputations, are collateral damage of the government’s war on terrorism.
“This may be the first time a computer-security problem has had such sustained interest on a national level,” says Stephen Cobb, senior security researcher at cybersecurity firm ESET North America.
Google, Facebook and others are pouring money into security, mirroring an industry-wide trend. Cyber IT budgets are expected to soar from $65 billion this year to $93 billion in 2017, says tech market researcher Gartner. Last week, Microsoft confirmed that it plans to step up its cyberdefenses to thwart the NSA.
The NSA’s staggering ability to access rich troves of data at the largest companies strikes at the core of consumers’ and businesses’ confidence in computer security and privacy. Encryption, the holy grail of security for the largest tech firms — in which digital messages are scrambled and unscrambled so third parties cannot read them — was easily cracked by the NSA through court orders, supercomputers and technical wizardry.
Deeply shaken tech executives, who are increasingly dependent on customer data in their pursuit of advertising revenue and fear a backlash from spooked consumers, have been loath to speak publicly about their efforts to counter government snooping.
The government routinely pried into the data systems of the largest tech companies in an online surveillance program it says has been necessary to combat terrorism in a post-9/11 world. It has done so largely without the knowledge of those companies.
Read the full story by Jon Swartz, USA TODAY.
