As someone who uses and relies on many Google products, I’m concerned when the company’s CEO says “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
This quote is attributed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2009. Tim Carney has more in the Washington Examiner at Even law-abiding people should oppose surveillance.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2009, “maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
This line was creepy enough coming from one of President Obama’s confidants and fundraisers. It takes on added weight now that the Washington Post and the Guardian have reported that the National Security Agency’s Prism program, in the days before Obama was sworn in, tapped into Google’s servers, gaining access to every message sent or received over Gmail.
Google spokesmen, like spokesmen from all the tech companies, deny participating in any such program. So Americans are left to wonder: Was this corporate-government collusion? Was this federal hacking or infiltration of corporate servers?
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