Apple joins the rest of the IT giants in its calls for NSA program reform.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has joined Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Yahoo !, Facebook and other giants of the IT industry in their calls for reforming NSA programs. As everyone knows, earlier this year, it turned out that the National Security Agency used information from IT companies to control citizens all over the country without the approval of the prosecutor.

The companies that are allegedly involved in the PRISM program refused to transfer any user data to the state, but the leaked NSA presentation slides seem to suggest otherwise.

The new joint campaign, called the “Reform of the State Monitoring System”, contains five driving principles that seek to curb excessive government espionage:
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• Restriction of the government's authority to collect information about users. The government should limit its ability to force providers to disclose user data. In addition, the government should limit monitoring of known users, and limit the possibilities for massively collecting data from Internet communications.
• Supervision and accountability. Intelligence services that collect data must carry out this process in accordance with a clear legal framework within which their authority is subject to restraining and counterbalancing forces.
• Transparency of government activities. Transparency of the activities of the supervising organization and all programs that are managed within its authority.
  
• Ensuring the free flow of information. The possibility of free access to information outside the country is a necessity for the development of the global economy of the 21st century. The government should not obstruct the access of companies or individuals to obtaining legal information that is stored outside the country. The government should not require providers to locate their infrastructure within the country.
• Avoiding intergovernmental conflicts. In order to avoid contradictions, laws should be as transparent as possible. In the case when the laws of one jurisdiction conflict with another, the responsibility of the government is to resolve the conflict through joint efforts.
  

Also, an open letter was drawn up to state officials, in which they were accused of exceeding their authority and violating the rights of companies and ordinary citizens. Finally, there is a petition in the letter that the United States guarantees to limit such observations by law and place them under strict supervision.

Text of the letter

Dear Mr. President and Members of Congress,

We understand that the government is obliged to protect its citizens.
But this summer has shown the need to reform the state monitoring system throughout the world. In many countries, this balance is broken and unfortunately not in favor of ordinary citizens. This undermines the freedom that we all cherish. It is time to change.

For our part, we are focused on the preservation and security of user data, namely the deployment of the latest encryption technology, to prevent unauthorized monitoring of our networks, until we are convinced that the government’s actions are legitimate and reasonable.

We urge the United States to take the initiative and implement reforms that ensure that government oversight efforts are clearly limited by law. To see the full set of principles we support, visit ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com

Respectfully,

AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo

Whether the US government will react to this action, we can only guess.

Other sources:
reuters
blogs.wsj.com