Pri-(e)-vate Eyes;  They Are Watching You, Watching You….  And today the big guns fired back…BOOM! BOOM!BOOM!

In a letter to Obama during a time of the year usually reserved for  letters to Santa,  the top heads of these eight IT companies, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo demanded changes take place….

“This summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.”

The Following are a Bill of Rights for an Artificial Intelligence Age… The Bedrock of the next 200 years…..

  1. Limiting Governments’ Authority to Collect Users’ Information… Governments should limit surveillance to specific, known users for lawful purposes, and should not undertake bulk data collection of Internet communications
  2. Oversight  and Accountability…Reviewing courts should be independent and include an adversarial process, and governments should allow important rulings of law to be made public in a timely manner so that the courts are accountable to an informed citizenry.
  3. Transparency About Government Demands… Governments should allow companies to publish the number and nature of government demands for user information. In addition, governments should also promptly disclose this data publicly.
  4. Respecting the Free Flow of Information…  Governments should permit the transfer of data and should not inhibit access by companies or individuals to lawfully available information that is stored outside of the country.
  5. Avoiding Conflicts Among Governments,,, there should be a robust, principled, and transparent framework to govern lawful requests for data across jurisdictions, such as improved mutual legal assistance treaty — or “MLAT” — processes. Where the laws of one jurisdiction conflict with the laws of another, it is incumbent upon governments to work together to resolve the conflict.

If one remembers correctly, these large conglomerates were originally skeptical when the scope of Snowden’s announcements were first previewed.  However as continued information was released, they became very alarmed and harsh critics of the spying program.

Truth is:  today one cannot trust any US server… The Russian’s have a higher level of respectability; only the Chinese are less trusted than Americans when it comes to international commerce…

For this to change, and again establish America as the land of the free, (funny how that rings true, isn’t it),  oversight needs to be in place now.

Impartial and non-intelligence agency sources need to become the deciders over whether each spying incident should be sanctioned or forbidden.  Furthermore, reopening the possibility of  legally acquiring robust monetary damages for whenever such information is misused and creates harm, would indeed be the greatest safeguard in preventing such data mining to occur, ever again….

In all regards. the NSA has overstepped its bounds and all bulk acquisition of data should be made illegal and destroyed….

The cost is far more than any benefit would warrant.