Apple and about 40 companies have signed an open letter to Barack Obama and the US Congress with a request to amend the law governing the activities of secret services.Influential American corporations insist on limiting the powers of the NSA and more transparent operation of the state in terms of access to personal data.
According to Cnews, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Evernote, Twitter and AOL, members of the consortium Reform Government Surveillance, Mozilla, and about three dozen companies have sent an open letter to members of Congress, US President Barack Obama and several other high-ranking officials with a request to limit the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA).
In particular, the company was asked to change the legal framework in order to prevent the NSA to collect data indiscriminately, including information on any unsuspecting ordinary users. The second paragraph of the petition concerns the transparency of the state in terms of data collection. It says that it is necessary to declassify the Court's activities for Foreign Intelligence. That court shall rule on the monitoring of people who are in the US, but are not citizens of the US government.
NSA activities are currently regulated by Article 215 of the US law "Patriot", adopted in 2001 after the terrorist attack, which resulted in the destroyed World Trade Center towers in New York. The law has significantly expanded the powers of the US intelligence services. In his article under the number 215 states that pursuant to a duty to protect the US from terrorist attacks FBI and NSA can collect metadata phone calls (phone numbers, the calls and their duration), as well as other data on the communications of people, even if they are not suspected of violation of the law.
June 1, 2015, Congress should once again decide the fate of the law - to extend it in its current form, or to amend it.
The requirement for the American high-tech companies to stop mass surveillance of citizens emerged after the June 2013 Edward Snowden, a former system administrator NSA and the CIA, has published information about the secret program Prism, which allegedly involved Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and other companies providing special services data about their customers. Companies, for their part, denied any involvement in the program.