Concerns over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), as well as attempts by intelligence agencies to collect user information from email and social networking sites, appeared on the second-quarter lobbying disclosure reports of several tech firms.
After several quarters of increasing expenditures on lobbying, a number of the big name high-tech companies backed off a bit, the filings showed. But despite the lower expenditures, 12 organizations specifically cited concerns over FISA in their second quarter reports. The topic wasn’t mentioned in any first quarter 2013 reports, before public revelations that the National Security Agency was collecting data on American citizens from email and social networking sites.