Google share price: Tech giants to bring NSA reform fight to US Congress

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) and a number of other technology companies in a coalition aimed at prompting a reform to US surveillance programmes, are planning to bring their fight to the US Congress this week, Bloomberg reported on Saturday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation.

According to the sources, the tech giants plan to ramp up lobbying members of the Congress, unsatisfied by the reforms proposed by US President Barack Obama last Friday.

In today’s trading Google shares were up 0.4 percent at $1,155.31 as of 15:52 UTC. At the same time, Apple’s share price rose 0.8 percent to $544.92 and Microsoft’s fell 0.5 percent to $36.55.

Crucial details’

On Friday, US President Barack Obama outlined new measures in response to the uproar triggered by last year’s revelations of phone and Web spying by the NSA.

In his speech last Friday, Obama said that he would require a judicial review of requests to query phone call databases and ordered the Justice Department and intelligence officials to devise a way to take storage of that data out of the government’s hands. The technology companies were promised more transparency, but no specifics were given.

An alliance of technology companies demanding reforms to surveillance laws to preserve the public’s “trust in the Internet” released a statement on Friday, welcoming the changes.

However, the coalition, comprising Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) and AOL (NYSE:AOL), said that some “crucial details”, related to their central request to be able to disclose what the NSA asks for to the public, remain to be addressed.

Additional steps are needed on other important issues, so we’ll continue to work with the administration and Congress to keep the momentum going and advocate for reforms consistent with the principles we outlined in December.

On December 9, the eight companies addressed an open letter to Obama and the congress and outlined five principles they believe the surveillance reforms should be built upon.