PETER SUDERMAN: Why Are Big Tech Companies Denying Involvement in the NSA’s Internet Data Mining Program?

Related: Internet Companies Deny They’re Helping the NSA Collect User Data. Should We Believe Them?

UPDATE: A reader emails:

What if Google killed Reader (a decision that still seems to make little sense to the active user) over PRISM? That is, for those that use Reader for their surfing, it’s a giant collated list of most of what they do online. If the feds were including Reader requests along with all of the email, etc. that they were scooping up, might Google’s best defense (if they were in fact trying to follow the “Don’t be Evil credo”) be to simply discontinue the service and at least quit generating the history going forward?

And what if all this web data was shared with a campaign apparatus? Wouldn’t this be a great way to target your resources towards states that were winnable over ones that were probably (based on web traffic analysis) outside of your abilities to win? Isn’t this just an extension of the Nate Silver type approach, but with orders of magnitude more data to work with? Incumbents would be all but invincible with this kind of information. And that doesn’t even get into the ability to blackmail just about anyone based on something in their web history over the last 15 years.

Please withhold my name if published. I don’t want that thing pointing at me. Though I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, since they’re reading this email anyway. This should bother everyone a whole lot more than it seems to be right now.

I think people are catching on.