Tech companies have become more engaged in the debate over the NSA. Tech giants hire first NSA lobbyist

Apple, Google, Facebook and five other technology giants that have banded together in their calls for surveillance reform officially registered a Washington lobbyist on Thursday.

The new hire — tasked to represent a coalition that also includes AOL, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo — is a big political move for an industry that initially had tried to avoid the debate over the National Security Agency. Tech companies recently have become more engaged, however, as they discover they have serious business interests at stake.


The so-called “Reform Government Surveillance” coalition hired Monument Policy Group, a firm that already represents Microsoft and LinkedIn individually. The group filed its formal lobbying registration Thursday, according to sources familiar with the matter — but the official document has not yet been posted online.

The coalition of companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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With each leak from Edward Snowden — who unleashed a trove of documents exposing the U.S. government’s programs to monitor phone call logs and Internet chats, break Web encryption and tap into overseas data cables — Silicon Valley increasingly has opened up in Washington.

The industry has endeavored to demonstrate it is not complicit with the NSA — criticism that’s especially prevalent in Europe, where tech companies could be subject to new privacy rules that increase their costs of business.

Since the summer, tech giants individually have ramped up their lobbying on the issue. Each quarter’s lobbying reports reflect that companies have committed new resources toward seeking more government transparency and, most recently, limits on what data the NSA can collect. Government surveillance first appeared in Apple’s lobbying reports in 2013, a year in which Apple in total spent more than it ever has in Washington. Facebook, meanwhile, only recently started warning U.S regulators about data “localization” — the idea, brewing overseas, that tech companies should locate their servers in the country where those users reside.

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The coalition, which came into existence in December, quickly kicked up the conversation a notch — at one point, taking out full-page advertisements in major newspapers to encourage the White House and Congress to act. When tech CEOs later met with President Barack Obama, and after the president delivered his major surveillance reform address, the eight companies continued to speak as one group advocating for basic reforms. And each company, individually, has responded more aggressively with each passing month of the debate.

That includes Twitter, which excoriated the U.S. government on Thursday for its transparency practices. A week after tech companies brokered an agreement with the Justice Department that allowed them to disclose new data about national security requests, albeit with strict limits, Twitter said the settlement “violates our First Amendment right to free expression and open discussion of government affairs.” And with it, the company threatened potential legal action.

“Allowing Twitter, or any other similarly situated company, to only disclose national security requests within an overly broad range seriously undermines the objective of transparency,” Jeremy Kessel, Twitter’s manager for Global Legal Policy, wrote in a blog post.

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