Zuckerberg Voices Frustrations With NSA To Obama After Reports Of Facebook-Based Spying
MENLO PARK (CBS SF) -- In a post on his social network, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he called President Barack Obama to air his frustrations over the U.S. government's surveillance programs, run by the National Security Agency.
In the Facebook post, Zuckerberg wrote Thursday that he "called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future...[the U.S. Government needs] to be much more transparent about what they're doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst."
The comments came just hours after the news site Intercept reported that "In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target's computer" and pull information from the hard drive.
The NSA has said the report is "inaccurate."
It would appear Zuckerberg had heard about the report.
"I've been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the U.S. government," he wrote. "We encrypt communications, we use secure protocols for traffic, we encourage people to use multiple factors for authentication and we go out of our way to help fix issues we find in other people's services...When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government."
White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden confirmed to the Associated Press that the president spoke with Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg signed off of the post by encouraging internet users to "build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure." He said Facebook would remain committed to that goal.