Google and the N.S.A. Spying Apparatus

“[I]t’s high time that governments get together and decide some rules around this,” David Drummond, Google’s top lawyer, said in an online Q. & A. with the Guardian on Wednesday, which addressed the company’s challenge to the blanket secrecy that surrounds the U.S. government’s domestic-spying apparatus. “It’s really important that all of us give close scrutiny to any laws that give governments increased power to sift through user data.” In a motion filed earlier this week with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which approves and denies (mostly approves) the government’s demands for personal information from telephone and Internet companies for national-security purposes, Google argued that it had the right, under the First Amendment, to publish details of the court orders it receives. As well as filing a legal motion in the FISA court, which operates according to its own rules, Google has petitioned the Justice Department for permission to disclose the number of FISA orders it receives, and how many personal accounts are covered under those orders.

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