“We are still members”Įvernote joined the coalition in October 2014, a year and a half after PRISM first came public, though the company was never named in the leaked Snowden documents. “We hadn’t noticed that our logo was removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website,” said an Evernote spokesman when asked for comment by TechCrunch. Even stranger, no one noticed, not even Evernote, for two years. Īpple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, and AOL (later Verizon Media, owned by TechCrunch – for now) were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance or RGS, adding Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap, and Zoom over the years as members.īut sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. The idea was simple enough: to ask lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats instead of sluggishly collecting Americans’ private data, provide more oversight, and allow companies to be more transparent about the nature of the secret arrangements of user data they are receiving. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition called Reform Government Surveillance, which, as the name suggests, was supposed to use legislators to reform government surveillance laws.

In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of having passed their users’ data on to the US National Security Agency as part of the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Evernote quietly lobbying group website