Over the past few weeks, the NSA has come under fire for its domestic spying operations and because of this, many tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others, have been in the spotlight for their cooperation with the agency to aid such activities.
Released earlier today, was a report for the major tech companies that outlined their lobbying efforts for the previous quarter. You would think that the NSA related activities would be a huge part of the lobbying efforts by theses companies to help protect their image but despite petitions to release more information about their cooperation with the NSA, only Microsoft and Facebook mentioned these laws as part of their quarterly report.
The majority of the money, which totaled 8 million for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook, was targeted at immigration reform and cyber security. Those who are familiar with the lobbying efforts by these companies stated that the silence by these corporations highlights the sensitivity of this surveillance program.
Considering that Microsoft has been fighting back against the public perception that the company was providing an open back-door policy to its information, you would have thought that they would have been more proactive in trying to persuade congress to allow them to be more transparent in there operations to save public face.
We will have to wait and see what the next quarter report bring in terms of lobbying efforts, to determine if the companies really are holding back, or if the information broke late in the quarter and they didn"t have time to adjust their lobbying efforts.
Source: Politico