According to a survey conducted by an email firm ProtonMail, the government of the United States is reported to be using technology firms like Google and Facebook to conduct mass surveillance from the last decade or so. Now evidence is out that the data requests put forward by the government to Google are said to have increased by 510% since 2010 and to Facebook by 310%.
End to end encryption involved email services provider ProtonMail claims that Google received more than 157,282 data requests from US law enforcement in 2019, whereas Facebook received around 269,000 from all around the world.
This clearly states the fact that under the name of National Security, the government of the United States is collecting massive amounts of user data, as against the ‘Freedom of Act’ passed by the Congress in 2015- banning the governments from collecting user data on a massive note.
Consequently, the latest findings match the facts revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program conducted without the knowledge of the online users in America.
Reacting to the news first posted in Daily Mail, a source from NSA claims that all seems to be fair when it comes to ‘National Security’ and argued that the law does allow the government to request data from private companies. But the source forgot the basic fact that it doesn’t allow private businesses to collect data in the bulk of its users and share it with anyone on request- without the interference from the court of law.
On the other hand, Google justifies its move and states that any non-cooperation with the government could attract penalty or ban of its service- again an awful stance seen in the case of Amazon which is now loosing all the federal contracts due to Jeff Bezos not so cordial relationship with US President Donald Trump.
ProtonMail report also throws light on “Fourteen Eyes” which is an alliance of 14 countries that agreed to share cyber intelligence among them. And the email services provider states that the US tops the list among the rest 13 countries to request for data of users from companies like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft.
