Google, Apple and Facebook write to Congress to reform the NSA

The web giants refute any illegal collusion with the U.S. intelligence services.They claim that the NSA act with greater transparency.

Since the revelation of the monitoring programs of the NSA, the web giants are multiplying initiatives to assert their good faith.

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Six major U.S. technology groups urge Congress to further control the NSA, the agency responsible for intercepting communications, demanding more transparency in the monitoring and protection of privacy.

"Many concerns have emerged in the United States and abroad about the recent revelations about surveillance,"argued Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL in a letter sent Thursday to the heads of committees Justice of the House and Senate.

Since the first revelations on U.S. surveillance programs of the National Security Agency (NSA), these companies step up efforts to assert their good faith.

Accused of providing thousands of digital data on Internet, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook have even filled in justice to be able to say more about the inquiries they receive from U.S. authorities.

Transparency is an essential step

"More transparency" explain these companies in this letter, "would give the lie to the false accusations that intelligence agencies have direct access to our servers, or that we participate in the operations of massive data collection on the internet."

"Transparency is an essential first step to an informed public debate, but it certainly needs to be done," they add. "We believe that the practices of government oversight should also be reformed with additional protections privacy and an increased risk of these programs' control.

This letter arrived a few days after new revelations about the interception of data from hundreds of millions of users of Google and Yahoo! outside of the United States since the optical fibers used by the Internet giant.

Yahoo! and Google were outraged by these new revelations, ensuring not to be involved in these interceptions.

A shy project to reform intelligence

On Thursday, the Intelligence Committee of the U.S. Senate has approved a tentative plan to reform laws governing surveillance activities of the intelligence services, the first step of a long parliamentary procedure.

Measures would aim to increase transparency, for example by forcing the intelligence services to report to Congress any violation of the law by their analysts.

But the text does not end with the collection of all phone calls data passed via U.S. operators (dialed, time, duration of calls, but not voice recording) by the NSA, which was the program first revealed by Edward Snowden in June.