Email exchanges between National Security Agency (NSA) Director General Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt reveal a much more comfortable working relationship than Google presented after last year's revelations by Edward Snowden.
Al Jazeera news agency today published two emails dating back a year before Snowden began leaking information about the actions of the US intelligence agency.
On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Keith Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour classified briefing on “external threats” and on August 8 to a meeting to be held at a “secure facility near San Jose, California.”
“The meeting will discuss specific topics, to get guidance, on mobile threats and security,” Keith Alexander said in an email.
Keith Alexander, Schmidt and other tech executives had met earlier, according to the message. But Keith Alexander wanted another meeting with Schmidt and “a small group of CEOs” later that summer because the government needed Silicon Valley’s help.
“About six months ago, we started discussions focused on mobile security,” said Keith Alexander. “With a group (primarily Google, Apple, and Microsoft), we recently agreed on a set of core security principles.”
Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center, said she believes information sharing between tech companies and the government is “absolutely necessary,” but “at the same time, there is some risk to user privacy and security from the way vulnerabilities are disclosed.”
The challenge facing the government and tech companies is to strengthen security without compromising privacy, Granick said. The emails between Keith Alexander and Google executives show “that the informal exchange of information is done in secret, there is no transparency, or a methodology for getting security information into the right hands.”
Read the leaked emails from Al Jazeera.com
