Privacy Rights Battle over Server and Phone Records Escalates — Was the Media Wrong?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Almost every large tech company with email, search and app capacity denied reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian that claimed the U.S. government tracked the activities of citizens as a way to detect terrorism or other threats to national security. Companies that included Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) denied the reporting by the two papers, which was picked up across the media world.

People are now left to ponder whether important media misstated the extent of the government’s “spying” or whether much of the rumored “spying” actually happened. And they are left to decide if major media were right or wrong about which companies were targeted by the government for data collection

A sampling of some reactions:

From Reuters:

With regard to the Post:

Some of the companies named in the article — Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook — immediately denied that the government had “direct access” to their central servers. Microsoft said it does not voluntarily participate in any government data collection and only complies “with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the report contained “numerous inaccuracies.”

The NY Times:

The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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