In stories broken today by The Guardian (UK) and The Washington Post (USA) it has been reported that the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) has “direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple”.

Commenting, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founding director of the World Wide Web Foundation said:

“Today’s revelations are deeply concerning.  Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society.

“I call on all Web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data.  Over the last two decades, the Web has become an integral part of our lives.  A trace of our use of it can reveal very intimate personal things. A store of this information about each person is a huge liability:  Whom would you trust to decide when to access it, or even to keep it secure?”

ENDS

Additional information

The original Guardian article can be found here.

Earlier this week, the United Nations released a statement warning that state surveillance of online activity undermined freedom of expression. This statement can be found here.

Media requests to press [at] webfoundation [dot] org