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Apple, along with over 30 other technology corporations, investors, nonprofit groups and trade entities, have signed a letter urging the U.S. Congress to pass the Surveillance Order Reporting Act of 2013 and the Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013, announced The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) (via The Verge).
Specifically, the letter [PDF link] calls for the signing of both pieces of legislation, which requests that the government deliver increased transparency and requires the government to provide technology companies the right to publish statistics about demands for user data.
The concerns about government use of user data collecting began ramping up in June, when a U.S. government program named PRISM was revealed to be giving the U.S. National Security Agency direct access to user data on corporate servers across a wide spectrum of Internet companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), on behalf of a broad coalition of Internet companies and advocates for free speech and privacy rights, today delivered a letter to the leaders of the US Senate and House Judiciary Committees supporting two bills that substantially increase transparency around government surveillance of the Internet. Many of the same companies, such as Apple and Twitter, along with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, joined with CDT earlier this summer to send a letter to Congress pressing for the introduction of such legislation. The news comes after Apple vowed to team up with tech companies to ask for greater NSA transparency in July and after it released a statement on customer privacy and law enforcement requests for user data in June. Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with other tech executives, also met with U.S. President Barack Obama last month to discuss the issue of government surveillance.
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