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 "When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we
imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own
government," Zuckerberg said in a post on his personal Facebook
page.
"I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the
damage the government is creating for all of our future.
Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true
full reform," the 29-year-old Zuckerberg continued.
The phone call and Zuckerberg's 300-word missive on Thursday come
amid a series of revelations about controversial government
surveillance practices that were leaked by former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
"The president spoke last night with Mark Zuckerberg about recent
reports in the press about alleged activities by the U.S.
intelligence community," a White House official said.
The official declined further comment and referred to the National
Security Agency's statement released earlier on Thursday saying
recent media reports that allege the NSA has infected million of
computers around the world malware and that the NSA is impersonating
U.S. social media or other websites are inaccurate.
Facebook, which operates the world's No. 1 Internet social network
with 1.2 billion users, declined to comment beyond Zuckerberg's
post.
Secret documents published on news website The Intercept on
Wednesday showed that the NSA impersonated Facebook web pages in
order to gather information from targets. When those people thought
they were logging into Facebook, they were actually communicating
with the NSA. The agency then used malicious code on the fake page
to break into the targets' computers and remove data from them.
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Last year, Facebook moved to encrypt all its pages, making such
impersonation more difficult.
Previous media reports based on leaked Snowden documents detail how
the government may have tapped into communications cables that link
data centers owned by Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, intercepting user
data without the companies' knowledge or cooperation.
"The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a
threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they're
doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst," Zuckerberg said
in his post.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; additional reporting by Mark
Felsenthal in Washington, D.C.; editing by Leslie Adler)
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