Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle Dec 26 2013
It’s not a good feeling when your congressional representatives dip into your pocketbook, but that’s how thousands of California’s tech workers feel today. It’s an old story with a new twist, because we’re not talking about an unwanted tax increase or a regulatory action. We’re taking about the FISA Improvements Act, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Patriot Act for the next decade.
After National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations began to steadily appear in the U.K. Guardian, California’s Silicon Valley heard the reverberations loud and clear. The promise of the Internet 2.0, a fabulous tool of connection and innovation that turned so many of us into content creators and editors, promised that any kid with a talent for coding could become a millionaire by the age of 30, and lured Grandma onto Facebook to watch the grandkids frolicking 3,000 miles away, wasn’t what it seemed.
It was the equivalent of a nosy neighbor with a telescope pointed at our bedroom window.
Saving pennies all year long to put the latest techno-gadget under the Christmas tree wasn’t supposed to be an audition for a starring role in George Orwell’s “1984.”
That is why six leading technology companies (Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL) took the virtually unprecedented step earlier this month of imploring the government for more regulation – of the government. They begged the government to help protect the legitimate privacy needs of their users all around the world – before it is too late. The biggest obstacle to the growing perception that bulk, warrantless data collection by the government gives Americans the creeps and needs to stop, is right here in California – and representing Silicon Valley.
California’s senior senator, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is working overtime to destroy the Internet as we know it. Her FISA Improvements Act improves blanket and indiscriminate scooping up of enormous quantities of data by making sure the questionable legality of the NSA programs is enshrined into law – and the programs are expanded.
Even Republican Jim Sensenbrenner, an original sponsor of the USA Patriot Act, has balked at going that far, instead choosing to co-introduce a genuine NSA reform bill, the USA Freedom Act.
Silicon Valley’s own senator is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Tracy Rosenberg is the executive director of Media Alliance, a Bay Area democratic communications advocate. If you think California’s senators should look after the state’s economy, not to mention the U.S. Constitution, sign the open letter to the senator at www.shameonfeinstein.org, a coalition of several Northern California civil liberties groups, including Media Alliance.