As mentioned, on Wednesday I attended a tech exec panel held at Palo Alto High School (in the high school gym, which was a weird sort of setting for such a high powered gathering of folks — complete with gym echoes, and school bells buzzing, at one point leading a bunch of students to stream out to lunch just as Google’s Eric Schmidt started talking). You can see the video of the event here where the sound is actually much, much clearer than in the gym itself, where the buzzing old lights made it nearly impossible to hear half of the panelists).

Nothing necessarily earth-shattering was said by anyone, but it did involve a series of high powered tech execs absolutely slamming the NSA and the intelligence community, and warning of the vast repercussions from that activity, up to and including potentially splintering or “breaking” the internet by causing people to so distrust the existing internet, that they set up separate networks on their own.

The execs repeated the same basic points over and over again. They had been absolutely willing to work with law enforcement when and where appropriate based on actual court orders and review — but that the government itself completely poisoned the well with its activities, including hacking into the transmission lines between overseas datacenters. Thus, as Eric Schmidt noted, if the NSA and other law enforcement folks are “upset” about Google and others suddenly ramping up their use of encryption and being less willing to cooperate with the government, they only have themselves to blame for completely obliterating any sense of trust.

Read the Full Article: Source – Tech Dirt
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141008/17393628774/tech-execs-express-extreme-concern-that-nsa-surveillance-could-lead-to-breaking-internet.shtml

source not found