So this weekend was a lot. By Wednesday it was the Verizon phone records story, some FISA court order nobody outside a law library had ever heard of, and by Thursday night it was PRISM, and now its Sunday and the internet is basically one long group chat about which companies handed what over to the NSA. Im not going to try to explain the whole thing here because if you have a Twitter account you already know more than me, and by tomorrow there will be seventeen more leaked slides anyway.
What Ive actually been stuck on since Thursday isnt the surveillance itself, its the denials. Every company on that PRISM slide put out almost the exact same sentence within about six hours of each other, and it was some version of "we do not provide the government with direct access to our servers." Google said it. Facebook said it. Apple, which apparently only joined the program last year according to the leaked documents, said basically the same thing. Read that sentence again slowly. Nobody is denying they hand over data. Theyre denying a very specific technical arrangement (direct, unmediated server access) that almost nobody who isnt a systems engineer would have assumed was the accusation in the first place. Its the tech industry equivalent of a politician saying "I have never taken a bribe from a man named Gary" when the question was about bribery in general.
I dont think Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg got on a call Wednesday night and workshopped talking points together, to be clear, thats not what Im saying. Its just that when six or seven companies all reach for the identical careful phrase inside the same news cycle, that phrase came from somewhere, probably a lawyer, and probably the same handful of lawyers whove been fielding these exact requests for years and already knew exactly which words were safe. That part bugs me more than the actual data collection does honestly. Not because the collection isnt a big deal, its clearly a huge deal, but because the collection is at least an argument you can have out in the open, the kind of thing a country is allowed to disagree about. The denial language is just PR, dressed up to look like a fact.
Anyway. I spent about forty minutes Friday afternoon trying to figure out if I should care more than I currently do, given that I have had a Gmail account since roughly 2005 and every photo Ive taken since my first iPhone lives in iCloud, and I landed somewhere close to "yes but I am also not going to do anything about it today." I looked at Silent Circle for about ninety seconds, decided PGP key management sounded like a chore on the level of doing my own taxes, and closed the tab. Maybe thats the most honest thing Ill write all week. People keep saying this is the moment everyone switches to encrypted everything and I believe that approximately as much as I believed it after the last three "this changes everything" privacy stories, which is to say not very much. Convenience wins almost every single time, thats just how it goes, and Im not any better than anyone else on this one.
Small unrelated thing before I forget: WWDC kicks off tomorrow morning and I still have zero idea what happens to a keynote when its scheduled the same week as a story this big. Does Tim Cook say anything about it on stage, does he just pretend Moscone West exists in a bubble and talk about flat icons for two hours? My money is on option two. Apple statements this week have been about a paragraph long total, so I doubt were getting a follow up tomorrow, but Ive been wrong before. Either way Ill be half watching the livestream half refreshing Twitter, which is probably how most of the internet is going to spend Monday morning regardless of what Ive got on my own screen.
One more thing and then Im done for tonight: whoever leaked the original documents to Greenwald and Gellman is apparently going to reveal themselves publicly any day now, according to a few reporters who are clearly sitting on something. If thats true, the "who" part of this story is about to become a much bigger deal than the "what," and honestly I have a feeling well all be talking about a name instead of a program by the time I write my next post.