Facebook: "We Need Government Surveillance Reforms"

Today is The Day We Fight Back, an online protest organized by a coalition of groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Mozilla, Demand Progress, and others. Joining the chorus is Facebook's General Counsel Colin Stretch, who just authored a blog post titled “We Need Government Surveillance Reforms.”

Acknowledging the import of the day of digital protest, Stretch wrote on his Facebook blog that his company and the tech industry as whole haven't wavered in their recent push-back against state surveillance: “As an industry, we have recently announced principles of reform that advance global norms of free expression and privacy and ensure that law enforcement and intelligence efforts are rule-bound, narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight …”

Stretch reiterated that Facebook and the tech industry at large would like to see five major principles put in place. The first would limit government's authority to “collect users' information to specific, known users for lawful purposes with no bulk data collection.” The second calls for “robust oversight,” transparency, and accountability for intelligence agencies such as the NSA, with strong judicial review.

The “number and nature of government demands for user information” would also be made transparent, while information should be “allowed to flow freely across borders” without a demand that internet service providers locate a country's infrastructure. Lastly, Stretch called for a “robust, principled, and transparent framework” governing lawful data requests to avoid conflicts between governments. “We strongly encourage all governments to adopt these principles,” Stretch said, adding that Facebook “will continue to be aggressive advocates for more transparency and surveillance reform.”

Yet it's ironic that much of this state surveillance would be impossible if data mining for ad dollars wasn't one of Silicon Valley's dominant revenue models. Companies from Google and Amazon to Facebook and many hundreds of thousands of app-makers are all active in the data mining game.

Nevertheless, Stretch deserves some praise for speaking up on the Day We Fight Back. Of course, it's easy to dismiss the post as a calculated act of illusionist-like diversion (“We're not mining data—it's the government”), and/or an attempt to generate good press. But, when a company as big as Facebook calls for surveillance reform alongside a digital protest that includes a broad matrix of internet activists and crypto-anarchists, and many others people of diverse ideological positions, it's quite a significant event.

The real test is not how Facebook lobbies for surveillance reform now, but in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Electronic surveillance existed long before the internet, and it's an issue that won't be going away any time soon. If Facebook's commitment diminishes after surveillance reform stops dominating headlines, Stretch's post will amount to little more than empty rhetoric.