Google co-founder Larry Page: U.S. online spying is threatening democracy

rawstory.com Google co-founder Larry Page on Wednesday condemned U.S. government snooping on the Internet as a threat to democracy. His comments came during an on-stage chat at a TED gathering, where a day earlier fellow Google founder Sergey Brin had a virtual encounter with National Security Agency whistle blower Edward Snowden. A photo of Brin smiling with a robot remotely controlled by Snowden from a refuge in Russia, where the wanted man is in hiding, was tweeted by TED curator Chris Anderson and became an instant online hit. “It is tremendously disappointing that the government sort of secretly did all this stuff and didn’t tell us,” Page said during the chat with interviewer Charlie Rose. He reasoned that details of suspected terrorist threats, understandably, should remain cloaked but that the parameters of what U.S. intelligence agents do, along with how and why they do it, should be public. “We need to have a debate about that or we can’t have a functioning democracy; it is just not possible,” Page said. to read more: rawstory.com