“Government Should Be the Champion for the Internet, Not Threat” Facebook’s Zuckerberg Calls to Obama about NSA Spying
Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg express his frustration to the US governments' NSA spying over a phone call to the US President Barrack Obama. However, the social network magnet does not believe that his cause will be immediately resolved by the federal government.
Zukerberg wrote an open letter via Facebook on 13 March 2014 expressing his frustration on the US government's tardy response on reforming the National Security Agency (NSA). The Facebook CEO hit the government massive online spying program in causing distrust among the members of the famous social networking website. All of these come in the midst of the revelations of the controversial surveillance practices of the US government leaked by Edward Snowden, former contractor of NSA. In previous reports, Snowden also exposed that NSA tapped communication lines of Google and Yahoo to intercept user's data.
In the recent reports, the press published about the alleged activities of the NSA on looking through social network accounts on spying people. The U.S. intelligence community allegedly infected million of computers all over the world malware to conduct the said spying activities.
Leaked documents published in the news website The Intercept earlier this week showed that the NSA imitates Facebook pages to gather information from target users. So when users thought that they are logging in the social networking site, they are actually giving access to NSA to monitor them. The intelligence agency then releases a malware to create pages and break into several computers and get data from them.
Zuckerberg's ranting on the issue rooted from the point of distrust that may or is happening now to social networking site members and its potential users.
Aside from the open letter, Zuckerberg also phoned President Obama about the issue.
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden confirmed that Obama spoke to the Facebook chief about the issue on an article from Politico but did not gave much information about what was discussed.
NSA officials on the other hand said that the online spying using social networking websites and malicious malware breaking on computers were inaccurate.
Facebook is still the number one social networking site with billions of users from all over the world. The social networking website is among the many tech companies that pushes transparency on the national security requests for tech companies as well as some reforms on the NSA.