Published in News

NSA threatened Yahoo and Facebook

by on12 September 2013

We were going to be charged with treason

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hit back at critics who have claimed they were doing too little to fight off NSA surveillance.

Mayer said executives were told they would be jailed for treason if they revealed government secrets. Yahoo and Facebook, along with other tech firms, are pushing for the right to be allowed to publish the number of requests they receive from the spy agency. Mayer said she was "proud to be part of an organisation that from the beginning, in 2007, has been sceptical of those requests from the NSA."

However she said the company had to be careful because if it loses a battle with the NSA it's treason. She said it makes more sense to work within the system. Zuckerberg said the government had done a "bad job" of balancing people's privacy and its duty to protect. "Frankly I think the government blew it," he said.

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