Google is becoming a leading voice against government cyber-spying, with rank-and-file employees as well as top executives issuing scathing — and even expletive-laced — rebukes of the National Security Agency.
The unusual activism by Google — which ironically enough has been on the receiving end of frequent privacy complaints itself — follows newly disclosed documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden alleging that the NSA secretly had hacked Google's private data storage centers around the world.
Google's top security exec testified before a Senate subcommittee last week that the future of cloud computing — the practice of storing information on the Internet rather than on site — is threatened by these allegations of government spying.
If people don't trust their data is secure on the Internet, he said, they'll store it on a hard drive instead, reversing one of this decade's most fundamental computing innovations, and potentially resulting in untold economic losses.
Other tech giants on the receiving end of alleged government spying have chosen to write letters and seek new laws allowing them to release national security requests for data.
But Google's reaction has been far more explosive:
• On Oct. 30, Brandon Downey, a Google security engineer, took to his Google Plus page to publish a response to new allegations of NSA spying. "(Expletive) these guys," Downey wrote. Though Downey wrote that his opinions weren't those of his employer, they did seem to reflect the general sentiment of the company.
• Six days later, one of Downey's colleagues, Mike Hearn, wrote on his Google Plus page that he joined Downey in "issuing a giant (Expletive) You" to the NSA and adding, "Thank you Edward Snowden."
• That same week, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, called the alleged spying "outrageous," and said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: "There clearly are cases where evil people exist, but you don't have to violate the privacy of every single citizen of America to find them."
In testifying before the Senate subcommittee, Google's information security director, Richard Salgado, highlighted an estimate from Cambridge-based Forrester Research that the NSA's PRISM project, leaked to the media in June, could mean up to $180 billion in losses — or a 25 percent hit — to the cloud computing industry by 2016.
Those estimates were made before the latest news broke about the NSA having compromised Google's cloud servers.
Salgado testified data localization efforts are already beginning in South America.
If they become more widespread, he said, "Then what we will face is the effective Balkanization of the Internet and the creation of a 'splinternet' broken up into smaller national and regional pieces with barriers around each of the splintered Internets to replace the global Internet we know today."
The effects on Boston's innovation economy would be disastrous, with cloud computing services estimated to comprise 20,000 jobs in the area by 2015.
I never pegged Google for a privacy activist, but money, like politics, can make strange bedfellows.
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