Angry birds: Tech giants can give glimpse of NSA spying, but not much

The Obama administration’s decision to allow Internet companies to report broadly the number of national security requests they receive is a step toward improved public transparency for government surveillance, but less than meets the eye, civil libertarians and legal experts say. In the wake of revelations last year that popular social media companies had been targeted by the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program, five companies filed legal motions before the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to release more information about government data requests. Worried the surveillance would tarnish their brands, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Yahoo argued in legal filings that the step toward transparency was necessary to show customers more specifically the degree of surveillance conducted and to reassure them it was a tiny fraction of the total. New disclosures that the NSA has also been using data from smartphone apps, such as Angry Birds, to collect information on people, set off a new wave of reassurances to customers.



via Gaming News Headlines - Yahoo! News http://ift.tt/1mUl4Ax