Google’s Eric Schmidt: I don’t know how much the NSA is spying on us

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/21/googles-eric-schmidt-i-dont-know-how-much-the-nsa-is-spying-on-us/



Executive chairman says search company has ‘complained at great length’ to the US government over intrusion

Google’s Eric Schmidt: I don’t know how much the NSA is spying on us
By Charles Arthur, The Guardian
Tuesday, January 21, 2014 19:41 EST

Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has insisted he had no knowledge of the US National Security Agency’s tapping of the company’s data, despite having a sufficiently high security clearance to have been told.

He said that he and other members of the search company were “literally outraged” by the tapping by the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ – first revealed in the Guardian in June – and that “we’ve complained at great length” to the US government over the intrusion. Google has since begun encrypting internal traffic to prevent further spying, he said.

Speaking in a private session at the Guardian, Schmidt, 58, said: “I have the necessary clearances to have been told, as do other executives in the company, but none of us were briefed. Had we been briefed, we probably couldn’t have acted on it, because we’d have known about it. I’ve declined briefings [from the US government] about this because I don’t want to be constrained.”

But Schmidt, who was Google’s chief executive from 2001 to April 2011, was equivocal on the question of a pardon for Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked the documents that led to the revelations. “Had this information not come to light we would not have been able to (stop the NSA spying), I can understand the position he felt,” said Schmidt, who revealed that he had protested against the Vietnam war as a young man. But he said that on the question of whether Snowden should be pardoned or jailed, “I don’t think it’s so obvious one way or the other.”