Companies, rules, people.
Today is Wednesday June 19th and due to Barrack Obama is visiting Berlin we have had some demonstrations against the NSA, against the Prism program and against Obama himself (for not preventing Prism mostly).
But Prism and the NSA are not really what we will talk about, let’s focus on companies.
When I looked at the coverage of said demonstrations I was confused: Prism and the NSA are (from what we know) legal. And while there is a lot of merit to what John Oliver said in the first daily show he hosted
“I think you’re misunderstanding the perceived problem here, Mr. President. No one is saying you broke any laws. We’re just saying it’s a little bit weird that you didn’t have to.”
what confused me about the signs was the presence of so many company logos: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype … What have they done wrong?
There seems to be quite a lot of frustration among the Internet users about how the companies just acted upon court orders, handing over their user’s data over to the NSA. People argue that the companies should have just refused to hand the data over, to fight the government for the greater good.
Now I enjoy those Robin Hood stories as much as the next person, but I prefer them in the movies. And we have to keep in mind that we are not talking about some brutal dictatorship here: The USA are a democracy. The laws are made by people who have been elected for exactly that job, neither the lawmakers nor the law just fell from the sky.
What we were asking of the companies was wrong for two simple reasons.
Companies are not people
Even though a few misguided politicians have given them people-like rights, companies and cooperations are not people for a very simple reason: They have no conscience. There whole existence is build on the idea of generating profit. That is the system they have been placed in, that is their role in this game: Asking them to “do the right thing” is like asking a penguin to hold his cutlery properly; it just doesn’t relate to the concepts their world is build on.
The law is the only tool we have to make companies act in a way that is not directed at making money. Laws make them “care” about the environment or about the health of their workers. Companies act like a raging bull, running and running forward, ramming everything out of the way. That’s their nature. Laws are the fences that try to make sure they do not kill bystanders. Again, that’s just a simple consequence of how we build our world, our economic system.
Companies are not allowed to decide which laws to follow
When asking companies to ignore this one law we do not like we are opening up Pandora’s box. So Google and Apple decide not to cooperate and not to hand over data even though the government request is legal and signed off by a judge. Everybody rejoice!
But wait a minute. How can we criticize those companies now when they avoid paying taxes or taking good care of their workers? Maybe they just thought the taxes were unreasonably high so they did not pay?
When we start allowing companies to ignore certain laws, when we are in fact asking them to, we are removing the few things we have to control them, to force them not to just do whatever serves the bottom line.
We cannot blame companies for obliging legal requests. The other way around would be the actual scandal.
We need to work to get the laws changed in order to restrict unjustified governmental assaults on the people. We need to implement effective ways to intercept unjust governmental actions. We can also push companies to build systems that don’t allow surveillance (through end-to-end encryption), but since that probably makes is harder to earn money through advertising we have to be ready to start paying for this level of secrecy.
There are many different paths we need to follow, new structures we need to build and new alliances we need to form to push the law into a shape that we can build the future on. But relying on the conscience of companies for our well-being is none of those paths.
