Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a blog post on Thursday that he had held a telephone conversation this week with US president Barack Obama in which the Facebook CEO expressed his “frustration over the damage” the US government is “creating for all our future”.
Zuckerberg, 29, has become increasingly vocal about the fallout flowing from revelations of spying by America’s National Security Agency (NSA). New revelations suggest that the agency secretly spied on some of the social network’s more than 1,2bn users.
A new report, published by The Intercept, and based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, claims that the NSA set up machines to masquerade as Facebook servers in order to infect users’ personal computers with malicious software.
“I’ve called president Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform,” Zuckerberg wrote in the post, which was posted publicly on Facebook. The NSA has denied it impersonates the websites of US companies, describing reports of “indiscriminate computer exploitation operations” as “simply false”.
The full text of Zuckerberg’s post follows:
As the world becomes more complex and governments everywhere struggle, trust in the Internet is more important today than ever.
The Internet is our shared space. It helps us connect. It spreads opportunity. It enables us to learn. It gives us a voice. It makes us stronger and safer together.
To keep the Internet strong, we need to keep it secure. That’s why at Facebook we spend a lot of our energy making our services and the whole Internet safer and more secure. We encrypt communications, we use secure protocols for traffic, we encourage people to use multiple factors for authentication and we go out of our way to help fix issues we find in other people’s services.
The Internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world.
This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behaviour of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.
The US government should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.
I’ve called president Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.
So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the Internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I’m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.
