Google’s Drummond calls for NSA reforms

A senior official with Google has called for new reforms at the US National Security Agency after President Barack Obama’s speech earlier this month on government spying disappointed tech companies and people across the world.

Obama’s measures, as announced in his speech, to control spying activities on the NSA do not go very far, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, told BBC on Monday.

“Let me be clear about it, in general they fall short of where any of the speech and the proposal and the speech fell short of where we’d like to see this go,” Drummond said about Obama’s proposals at his high profile speech at the Department of Justice in Washington.

Drummond said that the US needs to change its approach to intelligence if it wants people to trust the Internet.

“People really need to trust the Internet and to trust Internet companies and that really underpins a lot of the innovation,” Drummond said. “We’ve been concerned about the long-term user trust in the internet and what that means for acceptance for new innovations.”

The comments by a Google official are some of the firsts from a giant tech company on NSA’s continued spying after Obama’s speech and shortly after Edward Snowden’s first on-camera TV interview Sunday.

Snowden, the American whistleblower who has blown the lid on US massive spying operations at home and abroad, spoke to ARD TV, a German television network, and said the US “government officials want to kill” him.

He also revealed that the NSA uses its surveillance tools to gain economic power on whatever it can put its hand on.

“If there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they’ll take it,” he added.

During his speech on January 17, Obama promised modest changes to NSA spying programs as he sought to reassure Americans and foreigners that the United States would take into account privacy concerns.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit that advocates for Internet privacy and free speech, rated the president’s speech a 3.5 out of 12, partly because it wasn’t ‘‘meaningful transparency reform.”

On January 18, Apple, Google and other technology companies said they were lobbying with some lawmakers to bring their fight with government spying to Congress.

They said that the Obama administration has not fulfilled their central request which is telling their customers more about what the government is doing to their private data.