False Friends of Digital Privacy

The period following May 2013 witnessed a slew of disclosures about mass surveillance. There were jaw-dropping revelations about National Security Agency programs, software, and spy gear. Someone leaked an entire catalog of malware developed by the Central Intelligence Agency. And let’s not forget all the juicy reports about companies secretly cooperating with the intelligence community to install backdoors, establish data-stream backchannels, and provide early access to information on vulnerabilities. Despite the bad publicity, it’s extremely unlikely that these covert programs and relationships abruptly ground to a halt. On the contrary, if the intelligence budget is any indication, the associated skullduggery has proliferated such that sophisticated cyberattacks are no longer the sole purview of three-letter agencies. This state of affairs has unsettling implications that Big Tech would prefer to sweep under the rug.