“Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it’s forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.” Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Until the gag orders are removed, we can’t trust anything these companies say because they are legally not allowed to tell us the truth.
Although I’d like to agree with you, gag orders or not, the worth of the words of companies such as Google is only as much as the content of one’s wallet.
If it’s a violation of their freedom of speech and they truly want to speak up about it, then what’s stopping them? It’s not like they can’t afford (or don’t have) enough lawyers on their side when the federal government comes bitching at them… and if they win the resulting lawsuit, what exactly do they lose? It seems that there are at least a few other companies that were affected by this whole Prism leak and would probably back Google, if only for their own public image.
On the other hand, if they were silenced by court order for several years and they were only concerned about their “freedom of speech” after the leak recently, then maybe they deserve to suffer a tarnished image.
Yeah, yeah–so maybe they’re just trying to stay within the law to avoid penalties. That’s the most obvious claim I expect as a response to this. Companies get penalties in the form of lost money all the time, and a company of Google’s size can handle it. Lawsuits are nothing new to them, and if they really do have the freedom of speech protecting them, then what really is there to worry about?
The U.S. government was caught with its pants down using tactics of questionable legality behind everyone’s backs–including Google’s–and asking politely is all Google can do to stand up to them? Seriously? Google, quit being cheap. Grow a pair.
That sounds like the Dutch equivalent of “closing the barn door after the horse has bolted”. And yeah, it depicts this situation quite accurately 🙂