Increasingly, a few large companies control the flow and storage of most private data.  This data is so valuable for detecting potential national security threats that governments face an overwhelming temptation to tap into it. The US Congress seems to be of two minds about whether this is a good idea.

On the one hand, a bipartisan assemblage in Congress recently called Yahoo a moral pygmy for revealing the identity of specific users in response to a government subpoena from China:

The two top Yahoo Inc. officials on Tuesday defended their company’s role in the jailing of a Chinese journalist but ran into withering criticism from lawmakers who accused them of complicity with an oppressive communist regime. ‘’While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,'’ said House Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.).

[Yahoo’s] Callahan said, ‘’I cannot ask our local employees to resist lawful demands and put their own freedom at risk, even if, in my personal view, the local laws are overbroad."

Because Yahoo gave up personal data to the Chinese government, several dissidents were jailed without trial as threat to national security. (Google has a better track record of existing such requests but even Google gave in to the Chinese government’s laws demanding censorship in exchange for access to a lucrative new market.)

On the the other hand, Congress is preparing to grant immunity to US telecoms for giving the NSA access to all of their internet traffic without the court orders required by law. (Telecoms already have immunity from prosecution if the request for data is accompanied by a court order, but without such an order the law says they should protect users privacy.)

You can hear an interview on NPR with an AT&T employee who blew the whistle on the program.  The total flow of data monitored at just one location was 2.5 gigabits a second.  The employee reports that the NSA was monitoring not only the endpoints but also the contents of the communication using semantic analysis technology.