The Snowden revelations greatly troubled the corporations involved for more reasons than one. Some nations, like Brazil, considered setting up their own versions of the Internet to protect their citizens from American snooping—a move that would harm the business of companies such as Google and Facebook that greatly benefit from the unified World Wide Web. (Google is used by 1.17 billion people worldwide, while 1.35 billion use Facebook.) These same corporations also feared that Americans would stop using their services if they felt that their privacy was compromised. Many of their CEOs hold the libertarian view that that government regulations are a costly burden and that the government that governs least governs best. And they still seem to hold on to the vision that cyberspace is a new world that can govern itself.

High-tech corporations decided to use high-power encryption methods that will secure privacy for their customers—and that law enforcement and security agencies will be unable or at least will find it very difficult to crack. Some of these measures are designed so that even the companies themselves cannot decrypt the messages. Hence even if a court ruled that there are compelling reasons to seek the records of a person who is suspected to be a terrorist or a serial killer, the companies would be unable to decode the messages. The telephone companies also let it be known that they are unwilling to keep phone records, a reform measure that has been suggested as opposition increased to the NSA keeping these records.

Hence, when President Obama flew to Silicon Valley last week to plead and cajole high-tech CEOs to help counter cyber-attacks—rather than summoning them to Washington—they rejected his overtures out of hand. Eric Grosse, Google’s vice president of security and privacy, warned that “our business depends on trust. If you lose it, it takes years to regain” and stated that “their mission is clearly different than ours.” The CEOs of Facebook, Yahoo, and Google snubbed the president by not even showing up. Apple CEO Tim Cook summed it all up in a recent interview when he stated that the NSA “would have to cart us out in a box” before his company would provide the government with the keys needed to decrypt messages.

I join with those who hold that some surveillance is justified, as long as it is in line with laws enacted by Congress and guidelines approved by the courts, and the implementation of these measures is properly supervised by independent oversight authorities such as inspectors general, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and congressional committees. Such surveillance is especially justified because, in dealing with terrorism, prevention is essential. Terrorists cannot be deterred as criminals typically are, by bringing them to trial and punishing them after the fact, because many commit suicide when they attack. And, because the harm they cause can be so great, the government must seek to stop them before they strike.