Sunday, June 09, 2013
Steve Ballmer
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
United States
Dear Mr. Ballmer:
In consequence of recent revelations about NSA spying and PRISM, I give notice that this insignificant actor of the world stage will never ever knowingly buy a product or service from your company for personal purposes ever again. (However, I cannot, with intellectual and moral integrity, furtively discourage on political grounds, any clients/employers with whom I have to do, from doing so.)
As your company was the first corporate whore out of the gates to sign onto the PRISM program; to effectively give unscreened access to NSA officials to your server information; you will be the first with whom I will boycott. Other services that I use in the virtual world will see a similar action in future, as soon as I can find an adequate replacement.
It is my desire that my country and elsewhere would begin to seek ways to circumvent having to utilize network services located in the United States and its hubristic xenophobia to undermine the privacy of other nationals. However, I doubt that other governments and their elite classes will prove any less desirous of acquiring the means for social control; for good of for ill.
It is a trivial and insignificant notification, in itself; one that can hardly cause anxious nights. However, when my grandchildren and great-grandchildren ask what I did to prevent the architecture of oppression from coming about, I will have some claim to having resisted.
I thank you for all the years through which I have made a livelihood from your products; especially the many thousands of dollars as a contractor, fixing its security holes. But I cannot in good conscience give personal approval to your actions. As student of history, I have remembrance of the corporate whores of Nazi Germany, which gave sustenance to that regime and its atrocities.
Good riddance,
John Hutchinson
Brampton, Ontario
Canada
An Iconoclastic Orthodoxy 