Tech Companies and Government May Soon Go to War Over Surveillance
Everyone assumes that technology companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google don’t care that their customers are being spied on. I don’t believe that’s true.

On the very day the media dropped detailed documents on the NSA’s X-Keyscore collection program, the Facebook engineering team published a blog post stating that all access to Facebook via apps and web browsers was now SSL encrypted. Given X-Keyscore was a program primarily designed to intercept unencrypted internet traffic, you could be forgiven for interpreting Facebook’s post as a middle finger pointed in NSA’s direction. (Sources inside Facebook say it is a coincidence, and indeed the company had been in the process of enabling this across-the-board for years. But still. The timing.)...

...Before the Snowden leaks, it was hard to imagine the Tea Party and Occupy movements skipping together through meadows holding identical placards.

Not anymore.

Today, an attempt to introduce laws that would heavily fine software and internet companies for failing to make their products wiretap-friendly would be met by a full-scale revolt by the commentariat — and by the noisy political fringe on the left and the right.

President Obama was reportedly on the verge of backing the new wiretapping plan as recently as May this year. Only the “Snowden files” hit the press one month later, and surveillance became a hot-button issue. These laws seemingly dropped off the agenda.

For now....