[voidlogic]

Internal corporate collaborators unknown to the executives speaks to a failure of corporate security/infosec. I'd imagine current CEOs are increasing their organizations security measures to protect not only against corporate espionage but also state players. If you are CEO and you are forced to comply that is bad, but not nearly so bad as complying without knowing it is happening. Not knowing doesn't allow you to leverage legal, oversee the extent of compliance or plan for the contingency of the compliance becoming public.

[gojomo]

How many CEOs view their interests as separate and opposed to their home-country security services? That's who protects them from terrorism, sabotage, blackmail, and kidnapping! A corporate infosec policy that keeps out everyone except a few quasi-official security-state moles may be exactly what they want. Earn brownie points, avoid paper trails, "everyone" wins.

Probably, helping the security-state even makes keeping other security threats out, easier: if you play ball, they want their secret, exclusive access to be unique. They fortify the holes behind them, and can use their many, many vantage points to warn you about other emerging threats. Otherwise, you're on your own.

Do you want to be friends with the best-funded, legally-advantaged infosphere apex predator, or enemies?

[jacalata]

So your first post seems to say"the CEOs could plausibly not have known" and this post seems to say "of course the CEOs went along with it!" Which is an entirely different claim. Could you clarify?

[gojomo]

It's not binary. I'm considering a range of situations which explain both the denials and the NSA lawyer's report.

The CEOs might know, and think it safe to lie. (That's the "First" part of the topmost post.) They might not know because the NSA only approached targeted lower employees, and the combination of the law and the company's own structure prevents the full decision/compliance from every being told to the CEO. (That's the "Second" part of the topmost post.)

And the reason that the don't "know" could be that the NSA is really good at a targeted approach, or that the CEO has helped by making sure enough people to make the NSA happy are empowered and compartmentalized to do so, without it getting back to him. In such a case, he honestly doesn't "know" exactly whether or how much the NSA is poking around, but that's ignorance-by-design.

If the government were angry at a CEO engineering such ignorance to avoid criminal liability, they'd prosecute under the theory of willful blindness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness

But since the CEO is in this case doing the government a favor, the government will "look the other way" about the CEO "looking the other way"...

[voidlogic]

>How many CEOs view their interests as separate and opposed to their home-country security services?

Probably most in the tech industry now...