Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blasted the U.S. government's electronic surveillance practices this week, claiming he's personally called President Barack Obama to discuss his frustration.
"When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government," Zuckerberg said in a post on his own Facebook page.
"I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform," Zuckerberg added.
Zuckerberg's 300-word post and the phone call comes after a number of revelations concerning controversial government surveillance practices that were leaked in 2013 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
"The president spoke last night with Mark Zuckerberg about recent reports in the press about alleged activities by the U.S. intelligence community," a White House official said.
The National Security Agency released a statement this week saying recent media reports that claim the NSA has "infected" millions of computers all over the world with malware and that they are impersonating U.S. social media, and other websites, are "inaccurate."
The White House official declined to comment on the NSA's statement.
Facebook operates the world's No. 1 Internet social network, and has over 1.2 billion users currently,
News website The Intercept posted several documents online on March 12 showing that the NSA impersonated Facebook web pages to try gathering information from potential from targets.
When "targets" thought they were logging into Facebook, they were actually talking with the NSA. The agency supposedly used malicious code on the page to then break into and remove data from their computers.
In 2013, Facebook decided to encrypt all its pages, making impersonations harder to accomplish.
"The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they're doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst," Zuckerberg said in his post.
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