The US government isn't the only institution that is having a bad week when it comes to public perception. The PRISM scandal has pulled in a group of elite technology companies, whether they wanted to participate in this mess or not. Google, Facebook, and Yahoo are just three of the companies cited directly in a presentation from the NSA that Edward Snowden leaked to the British newspaper, The Guardian.
The details around how these companies were/are involved are certainly not flattering. They were originally accused of, essentially, turning over their servers to the FBI and NSA to pour over in search of clues for potential terrorist attacks. This includes search terms, emails, online conversations, bank statements, and everything in between. It became so in-depth at one point that analysts were claiming that the US government could see exactly what you were typing at any given time, meaning that I would certainly have raised a red flag or two for this post.
In the days since the news first broke, details around just how involved the Googles of the world are involved are unclear. But it didn't take long after The Guardian's original implication for the CEOs of those companies to immediately come forward and deny any knowledge of the program. This is important to remember moving forward: they denied even knowing of the program at all, let alone the extent to which they are allegedly involved.
From a communications perspective, these companies had to act fast. Google, Yahoo and Facebook were all swift in their denials, with Sergey Bin, Marissa Mayer, and Mark Zuckerberg quickly making public appearances to personally assure their users that their data is safe. On the surface this is the obvious choice to make. Certainly none of these companies want to be painted with the scarlet "C" (for conspirator), so a denial makes sense.
But as I mentioned above, details around this are murky at best. The companies were named directly in a report from the NSA. I think that it is highly unlikely that the NSA would have this report that states that these companies have given them access to individuals' data. The NSA has its reasons for withholding the truth; but I am suspect that they would outright lie in this regard.
For some reason or another, these companies that we trust on a daily basis with our most personal information were named in the report. A great deal of context is missing and there are more questions than answers right now. But it begs the question: if all of these companies were named in the report and they claim to know nothing of it, just what were they doing there then?
Now this brings us back to the original denial that these CEOs made when the news first broke. They all claimed to never have heard of it, have no role in it and tried to build a wall between them and the US government. If you believe that they were in the presentation for a reason, then this denial could prove problematic. We don't know what the extent of their involvement is, but it sounds like that they aren't actually just handing over their servers to the NSA and FBI. But that certainly doesn't mean that they have completely clean hands either.
Perhaps they don't know what PRISM is and have not heard of that project name. But they might know of it as another project name. The risk here is that if it comes out that they knew this is what the government was doing at any point, then they lied to their entire customer base at a time when that base needed to trust them most.
The danger of crisis communications, as in this case, is that if not handled quickly and properly then the issue can come back and bite you. As of right now, these companies seemed to have dodged a bullet with their denial and questionable details. Combined with the surprising unveiling of the whistleblower, the spotlight left them. For the time being.
But if further down the road the public finds out that they played some part in PRISM, whether they knew it or not, that's going to seriously damage their brand. And if it turns out that their hands aren't covered in blood, their communications team deserves a beer or two for acting fast and squashing the problem before it exploded into a full-blown crisis.
We're watching a potentially great case study on crisis communications unfold before us. I hope that for the sake of those comms teams they get it right.
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