(Guardian) Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, reiterated the tech industry's call for greater transparency from the US government over surveillance on Friday, but declined to "pass judgment" on American spying operations.
Speaking in New York, at an event hosted by the New America Foundation, Schmidt said it was time for a public debate about the nature of the surveillance activities carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA). But he also said that spying was a fact of modern life.
"There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society," he said.
With the other major technology companies, Google has been pressing the US government to be more open about the surveillance orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is also known as the Fisa court. He pointed out that Google has filed legal briefs to force the Fisa court to disclose more information.
Schmidt said his comments were based on the presumption that documents disclosed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden were "roughly accurate". Among the revelations from those documents were that the NSA operates a program called Prism, which internal agency documents claimed offered "direct access" to the servers of big tech firms including Google. Schmidt repeated the company's denial of this characterisation.
But he said it was legitimate to have a debate about how the NSA carried out its surveillance. He said: "We all have to look at ourselves and say: 'Is this what we want?'"
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