CaseyJones
11-14-2013, 04:40 PM
http://theweek.com/article/index/252729/how-silicon-valley-turned-on-president-obama
In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama's corner.
Google's executive chairman coached Obama's campaign team; executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new perspective: "F--- these guys."
That's what Brandon Downey, a security engineer with Google, wrote late last month, upon learning that the NSA had broken into Google and Yahoo and was exploiting the data of millions of users, allegedly without the companies' knowledge. He added, "We suspected this was happening, [but] it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America...The U.S. has to be better than this."
Executives at Google, which issued a polite denial when the first revelations about PRISM came out, were publicly furious over the new revelations (which the NSA denied): "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, told The Verge. This is the same company that in October 2012 gave $342,409 to Democrats and only $37,250 to Republicans, according to data from OpenSecrets.
In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama's corner.
Google's executive chairman coached Obama's campaign team; executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new perspective: "F--- these guys."
That's what Brandon Downey, a security engineer with Google, wrote late last month, upon learning that the NSA had broken into Google and Yahoo and was exploiting the data of millions of users, allegedly without the companies' knowledge. He added, "We suspected this was happening, [but] it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America...The U.S. has to be better than this."
Executives at Google, which issued a polite denial when the first revelations about PRISM came out, were publicly furious over the new revelations (which the NSA denied): "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, told The Verge. This is the same company that in October 2012 gave $342,409 to Democrats and only $37,250 to Republicans, according to data from OpenSecrets.