U.S. Government 'Blew It' On NSA Issue

Mark Zuckerberg said the U.S. government “blew it” in communicating what was happening with the NSA leaks.

While some technology executives have remained quiet about this issue and their relationship with the NSA, Zuckerberg was quite critical, particularly of the government’s public communication on the issue.

“I think they did a bad job balancing those things here,” Zuckerberg said at the TechCrunch conference today in San Francisco. “Frankly I think the government blew it–communicating the balance of what they were going for here with this.”

Zuckerberg said, for example, that the U.S. government’s initial assurances that the spying was only on non-American citizens was not helpful for U.S. companies with global reach.

“The morning after this started breaking, a bunch of people were asking them what they thought,” Zuckerberg said. “(They said) don’t worry, we’re not spying on any Americans. Wonderful, that’s really helpful for companies trying to work with people around the world. Thanks for going out there and being clear. I think that was really bad.”

Facebook is continuing to push to release more information about the information requests, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook last month released a report about government requests it has received for information about users. It said it received 11,000 to 12,000 requests in the first half of this year.

As far as Facebook’s business, Zuckerberg said that now that the company has passed 1 billion users, he wants to reach the next 5 billion people. In other worlds, the whole world.

Zuckerberg was asked if he has any advice for Twitter as it approaches its IPO. Zuckerberg joked that he’s the “last person” who should be asked about that. But he said that the IPO has actually made Facebook stronger. “I’m the person you’d want to ask last how to make a smooth IPO,” he said. “I don’t think it’s that bad. I actually think it’s made our company a lot stronger. In retrospect I was too afraid of going public.”

On immigration, Zuckerberg said he worked on FWD.US and immigration reform after teaching a class to children and finding out that some of them could not attend school because they were not citizens. He said he is not just pushing for high skilled workers to benefit Facebook but pushing for comprehensive immigration reform. “The tech community cares about changing the world. We made clear this is not just about the high-skilled. We’re going to push for comprehensive immigration reform.”

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that Facebook Home, the Android “skin” of Facebook has not gone as well as he’d hoped. But he said he still expects it to be popular.

Facebook is coming off a strong second quarter earnings report and its stock price has just reached an all-high today, surpassing its highest price after its IPO. Investors are showing increasing confidence in Facebook’s mobile advertising business.

Below is the live question-and-answer write-up of Michael Arrington’s interview of Zuckerberg.

Q: We haven’t talked since IPO how’s it going?

A: It’s been an interesting year. A lot of things always change around you when run a company.

My job is to keep us centered on what matters. Different companies focus on different things. You hear about back in the day the HP way of doing things. We’re focused on connecting everyone in the world and giving them tools to share whatever they want. When we first get started in my Harvard dorm, with my friend, we were building this site to share and connect within this community. One day someone would surely do it for whole world. This was the purview of the Microsofts and Googles. The story of Facebook started at one college and spread and kept growing. The reason we’re here is we cared more about this mission. For a while getting to a billion people was a big rallying cry. When we came to it, no one wakes up saying, ‘I want get 1/7 of the world to do something.’ As we approached and passed it, now we’re retooling the company to go take on harder problems that fulfill this mission For example, we want to connect the next 5 billion people. That’s going to be really hard because a lot of people don’t have internet access. Over the next 5 or 10 years we want to understand everything semantically, and play a role and help people build companies and grow the knowledge economy.

Q: So you want all the people?

A: We want to connect everyone.

Q: What do you think of the Yahoo YHOO -1.26% logo?

A: It seems fine to me.

Q: Twitter is going to IPO soon. What advice would you give to them?

A: I’m the person you’d want to ask last how to make a smooth IPO. It’s actually–I don’t think it’s that bad. I actually think it’s made our company a lot stronger. In retrospect I was too afraid of going public. I don’t think it’s necessary to do that. Sometimes it takes the market a while to catch up. Everyone thought this was some disastrous thing on mobile. People now spend one in seven minutes on web on Facebook, and on mobile its more–it’s one in five.

Q: Your mobile products sucked?

A: Yes. Absolutely, we took a bad bet. We focused on building in HTML5. We realized we weren’t going to get the quality level we need (we needed to change). We took a lot of shit. We focused on making the experience better first.

Q: You talked about the platform?

-forbes.com