Patrick Gray over at Wired wrote an interesting article in which he posits that Tech Companies and Government May Soon Go to War Over Surveillance. His notion is that while tech companies may have been willing to accommodate the NSA or allow themselves to be pushed around before the Snowden revelations they now realize that the subsequent destruction of their users’ trust represents an existential threat. One way of regaining that trust is to put in place robust systems that make NSA surveillance difficult or impossible. By doing this now they put the government in a bind. As Gray remarks, it’s one thing to pass laws prohibiting such changes and quite another to mandate that they be removed from users’ devices It’s pretty clear that the public wouldn’t tolerate the latter.
Now, it would appear that the first shot in that war has been fired. The Washington Post is reporting that Google has accelerated its program to encrypt data as it moves between Google data centers. Before this change, data in flight between the data centers represented rare points of vulnerability. Whatever their previous transgressions, if any, it’s clear that Google is moving at speed to make their users’ data tamper-proof.
When I first read Gray’s article I was a bit skeptical that the war would come to pass. Google’s action gives me hope that maybe it will.
update: represent → represents