The New York Times reports: Google’s canned responses to reports of government spying have ranged from “concerned” to “outraged.” But some of its employees have been more outspoken.

One of Google’s top lawyers testified before Congress Wednesday about surveillance, demanding urgent reform of email privacy laws and warning of threats to the open Internet and to the United States economy. Meanwhile, Google engineers who work on security railed against the government online.

The backlash against government Internet surveillance could hurt the United States economy, partly because businesses and consumers could abandon United States cloud companies, said Richard Salgado, the director for law enforcement and information security at Google, in testimony before the Senate judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law.

He cited studies like one from Forrester that predicted the cloud computing industry could lose $180 billion, 25 percent of its revenue, by 2016. [Continue reading…]