IBM Distances Itself From the NSA and Its Spy Activities 61
An anonymous reader writes "NSA surveillance has raised concerns among customers globally about the safety of their data from U.S. government spying. More organizations, companies and countries are looking for ways to distant themselves from the NSA activities to safeguard the information of internet users. IBM is the latest to fall into the category of companies that do not want to be associated with the NSA spy activities."
Lip service? (Score:2, Interesting)
Are they also stopping donations to politicians who support the NSA activity?
It's called LYING (Score:0, Interesting)
The owners of Slashdot fully expect, within five years, anyone who refers to the facts revealed by Snowden to be safely labelled as a "tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theory nutcase" in shill comments exploiting the goldfish-like memory of the sheeple.
Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Facebook, IBM et al are all preparing for that day. They LIE. They are TOLD to lie by the US government. They have full and total immunity over ANY lies they tell in the name of 'national security'.
So, of course they tell you they didn't co-operate with the NSA, aren't co-operating with the NSA, and even if they had, and are now, won't be doing it in the future. This is how stupid they, and the owners of Slashdot think you are.
Organisations like IBM don't give the NSA 100% co-operation. That would imply they just do as the NSA ask. NO! -companies like IBM are pro-active in specifically designing systems in the hope they will prove useful to future NSA full surveillance operations, making the situation far, far worse than mere co-operation by request. These companies compete with one another to INNOVATE such useful NSA functionality, that the NSA uses more of their methods in their spying than those of the other companies.
If IBM has a problem, it is that it CANNOT compete with Microsoft, Google and Facebook in usefulness to the NSA.
Even with the best of the intentions (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't associate with the NSA (Score:2, Interesting)
And even if we did, it's classified and we couldn't tell you anyway.
Re:Let's assume for a moment I believe them (Score:5, Interesting)
Qwest found out what happens when you challenge the NSA--you mysteriously lose government contacts. And then your CEO goes to prison.
Re:Let's assume for a moment I believe them (Score:5, Interesting)
Qwest found out what happens when you challenge the NSA--you mysteriously lose government contacts. And then your CEO goes to prison.
And if IBM truly does want to distance itself from these government agencies, that is exactly what they should be doing proactively.
The article has the headline IBM Distances itself from the NSA and its Spy Activities. If IBM were truly distancing itself, the article would have had a list of billions, nay, trillions of dollars worth of contracts that IBM was cancelling, along with an announcement that IBM would no longer make bids on NSA projects, and they would prohibit their products from being used as the backend as far as allowed by law.
Instead IBM has released a very specific bullet list of things they didn't do. [asmarterplanet.com] For example, one of the bullet points is "IBM has not provided client data ... under the program known as PRISM." Which is a wonderfully worded statement. They might have provided other data under PRISM. They might have provided client data outside of PRISM. But in that specific program, that specific data was not provided.
Sorry Robert C Weber, Senior VP at IBM, your words are too much like a lawyer's wiggling for my tastes. Does IBM really want to distance itself? In that case, actually distance yourself by terminating existing contracts and refusing to bid for future contracts.