Big Brother and Silicon Valley

[Commentary] The National Security Agency’s data-mining story has fundamentally changed the public’s picture of Silicon Valley and its relation to the state.

The Valley has, historically, kept as far away from Washington as possible. A strong, though not particularly ideological, strain of libertarianism appears to be coded into the DNA of computer engineers—a desire to be left alone to create beautiful systems that can be messed up only by the uncomprehending interference of mediocrities from the government. Partly as a result, information technology has been one of the country’s most lightly regulated industries. Last year, when Congress was poised to pass laws intended to protect intellectual property and prevent online piracy, tech companies, led by Google, struck back with one of the most effective lobbying tactics ever used: they shut down for a day. The effect was instantaneous—both bills went from easy sailing to overwhelming defeat. So much for that regulatory effort.

But the opposition between tech and government has been breaking down recently, and in ways not limited to the N.S.A. program. Silicon Valley was always aware of the downsides to a relationship with Washington, but now it knows more about potential positives, not just in the growing influence of tech money in political campaigns and tech endorsements of individual candidates but in industry-led advocacy efforts on issues like immigration reform, and in the idea of technology as a solution for chronic social problems. Now, it turns out, the biggest companies in the computer business—Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple, among others—have been giving vast amounts of user data to the government’s chief surveillance agency, in some cases for years.