Top secret U.S. intelligence agency NSA is not required to disclose the nature of its ties with Google, created to protect the Californian company from cyber attacks, confirmed on Friday the U.S. justice. It all started in 2010 when Google complained about attacks on its servers coming from Chinese servers, suggesting that the attacks were initiated by the Chinese government. In a decision last year, a federal district court judge sided with the NSA last year.
Athree-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the ruling yesterday, determining that the special status of the National Security Agency (NSA) allows it to keep secret any arrangement with the Internet giant. NSA refused to confirm or deny whether it had any relationship with Google. “Any information relating to the relationship between Google and the NSA would disclose protected information about the NSA,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown said.
This decision is in response to a request from a private association that defends privacy on the Internet. Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) wants the agreement between Google and NSA to be made public, on behalf of citizens’ right to know if they are supervised. EPIC is a public interest research group in Washington, D.C. established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.
The application was submitted following a series of attacks directed against human rights activists in China in January 2010. These activists have been subjected to attacks on their Gmail accounts, a Google email service. In order to protect users, the giant search engine company headquartered Mountain View, California, has used at that time NSA services, according to Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Alliance of the two entities is designed to locate Google weaknesses in its fight against hackers and assess their degree of sophistication, to determine if the defense systems created are appropriate.
But privacy advocates fear that the relationship between Google, the American multinational corporation, and NSA, the cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, is in violation of Internet users’ personal data privacy.
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