NSA Spying Risks $35 Billion in U.S. Technology Sales

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-26/nsa-spying-risks-35-billion-in-u-s-technology-sales.html

by puppetmaster3 • 13 years ago

89 52 13 years ago

bloomberg.com

puppetmaster3• 13 years ago

It's crazy that people don't connect the NSA to their job. Their job disappearing, like Detroit style.

Stage 1: denial.

salient• 13 years ago

I don't think that's enough. It needs to be 10x more than that before the government will start taking this issue seriously, and actually rein on NSA's power. And you can tell by the actions of their insider, Dianne Feinstein, that they have no intention of doing that right now.

When she will support bills like Rush Holt's Surveillance State Repeal Act that repeals the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, then you'll know the government is serious about reining in on their power and actually care about the many billions the US corporations stand to lose from not doing that.

Until then, pay no attention to their NSA "reforms" - or better yet, do pay attention, because they are likely to add in a lot of backdoors to give NSA more power by explicitly legalizing many of the things they have been doing, like Feinstein's "FISA Improvements Act", and call your representatives to reject it.

atmosx• 13 years ago

Give it some time, we will get there sooner or later.

Zigurd2• 13 years ago

I think you can count on that happening. If Cisco sneezed last quarter, the whole telecom infrastructure business in the US is going to have pneumonia.

spodek• 13 years ago

Who would have thought that acting like an asshole would drive people away from you?

Was that too blunt and direct? Somehow I don't think it's blunt and direct enough for the decision-makers to figure out this obvious consequence of their actions, however unintended and however well-intentioned they were when they decided to read so many people's emails as if they were entitled.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

I suspect they know. They just happen to be the types of people who would "burn down the kingdom so long as they could be king of the ashes."

iwwr• 13 years ago

There is no 'they' in this picture, nor a thing that can be personified (i.e. an asshole). It's just a currently broken set of institutions. There's no reason to be angry at institutions, only persons. Direct that anger at particular elected officials, the president, congressmen, and at particular people that act as enablers: people in the media, press or private persons in some (corporate) power that are advocating surveillance.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

Well, don't worry , the NSA is a 50 billion industry itself. So you could always work for the government as Obama wants.

thisiswrong2• 13 years ago

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini

Amadou• 13 years ago

- Benito Mussolini

Probably not him.

http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-f...

wavefunction• 13 years ago

Actually, for all you non-American persons why have been asking what can you do about the NSA...

The way to do it is through the pocketbook.

andyl• 13 years ago

Does Washington want a strong tech industry? Our own Senator Feinstein regularly votes against the interests of Silicon Valley. I see a Washington with lots of enthusiasm for Military and Oil/Gas, but not much for Technology.

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

Military and Oil/Gas combined has a bigger tech industry than Silicon Valley.

mkramlich• 13 years ago

it's also one of the Old Big Money sectors. along with Banking/WallStreet. other tech, speaking in obviously broad strokes, is newer/younger money.

lallysingh• 13 years ago

Those industries have lobbied a long time, and have been close with people who've built seniority now. It'll take a while for Tech to do that.

davidw5• 13 years ago

Our own Senator Feinstein regularly votes against the interests of Silicon Valley

So when are you (plural you) going to put your money and your time where your mouths are and find someone to challenge her, including in the primaries?

smokeyj• 13 years ago

Why should we have to outspend established industries just to have our voices heard? That sounds like a rigged game and a loosing battle to me. If any energy is to be spend addressing the issue it should be to route around these parasites, not greasing their wheels for adding no value to society.

dlsx• 13 years ago

NSA is hurting: US citizens US economy US confidence US foreign relations US privacy US law US

This isn't their government, it's ours. Take it back please.

1 person can make a difference. We are in this together.

thisiswrong2• 13 years ago

International anger over the National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance is hurting global sales by American technology companies and setting back U.S. efforts to promote Internet freedom.

Of course yea... because now we all know that the US (government)actively promotes 'freedom'. God the MSM really sucks these days.

diminoten3• 13 years ago

Comments in here currently are on par with YouTube. It's disgusting - we get it, you don't like NSA's spying programs. Breathless pontification on that point is utterly worthless. Stop.

Source report for the article: http://www2.itif.org/2013-cloud-computing-costs.pdf

I always laugh at graphs who move steadily upwards from the beginning of recording to the present, but then do insane things like dip dramatically and then rise prolifically in the future, like figure 1 in the report.

After looking at the endnotes for this report, it's clear that the writer has actually bought the meaningless blustering these companies and governments are doing. Threats, promises, and warnings aside, there's a distinct lack of actual action on the part of governments and companies towards this idea of harming US companies for what their government did.

alexeisadeski32• 13 years ago

YouTube comments are great. Everyone always bags on them, but the complainers have no sense of humor.

abraininavat• 13 years ago

I'm curious what you think comments are for, if not for people to express their opinions. Or is it only the comments of people who disagree with you that you'd like to stop?

diminoten3• 13 years ago

I apologize if what I said was unclear (ironically), but expressing one's opinion and expressing one's opinion well are two entirely different topics, and my complaint was of the latter, not the former.

sentenza• 13 years ago

This is all nice and well, but here on the ground, the NSA scandal has really bad consequences for tech companies.

Do you know what it is like to live in a jurisdiction where you are actually liable for what happens to the data of your users? Especially if it is data on teachers and pupils, which are (due to the fact that they are children) especially protected, as is the case with education software startups?

I can't use the Amazon cloud, can't use App engine, Cloudflare or anything that is connected to the US or companies with a US mother firm.

The whole situation is one infuriating clusterfuck and I find it really insulting when people claim that there are no real consequences to the recent scandal.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

I can't use the Amazon cloud, can't use App engine, Cloudflare or anything that is connected to the US or companies with a US mother firm.

But is that because of NSA spying, or because of the lack of privacy laws in the US? Because I know people who've not sent any user data to the US for years, certainly before they found out about NSA spying.

mpyne• 13 years ago

Do you know what it is like to live in a jurisdiction where you are actually liable for what happens to the data of your users?

No offense but it's this same reason that U.S. companies would be pilloried if they hosted all their users' private data on a cloud service hosted in Russia or China.

Even without an entity like the NSA an organization in the EU could not simply assume that any other nation obeys their data privacy rules without a strong bilateral agreement dictating just that.

That's not a consequence of the "recent scandal" as even now the scandal hasn't revealed anything with regard to non-U.S. networks that wasn't already known: the NSA intercepts communications abroad when they can, just as they've done since 1949.

The NSA stories have certainly brought it to prominence but anyone hosting their user's private data on Amazon's US-EAST before this, without a guarantee that the U.S. would obey European data privacy laws at the Virginia data center, was guilty of negligence at best, since no such agreement has ever been made to my knowledge.

What the NSA stories have helped to illustrate is that there is an essential disconnect between applying nation-level laws to global-level networks that needs to be rectified one way or another.

lawnchair_larry• 13 years ago

Do you know what it is like to live in a jurisdiction where you are actually liable for what happens to the data of your users? Especially if it is data on teachers and pupils, which are (due to the fact that they are children) especially protected, as is the case with education software startups?

This is why they wanted to pass CISPA.

diminoten3• 13 years ago

Actually, what you can't do is expose that data to the Internet, period, if you're attempting to be consistent with your, "NSA spying is causing me problems" viewpoint, because the NSA is monitoring network traffic around the globe, and decrypting what it can and storing what it can't.

So, if you're going to be internally consistent, you're going to have to delete all digital copies of all "sensitive" data, lest you yourself get hacked.

Or you could accept that with all operations there exists risk, and attempt to mitigate that risk using methods which are consistent between one another.

Not using US products gets you nowhere, in other words.

mhurron• 13 years ago

distinct lack of actual action on the part of governments and companies towards this idea of harming US companies

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/14/us-cisco-results-i...

Cisco's revenue warning comes after former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency through internet data, much of which is transmitted via Cisco's equipment.

Cisco's chief financial officer, Frank Calderoni, told analysts the company had been affected by a political backlash in China, but said it was difficult to quantify how much of its revenue shortfall was a result of this.

Zigurd2• 13 years ago

It's going to be much worse than that graph shows: http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of...

DanBC2• 13 years ago

I'm gently surprised that people aren't looking at all the other terrible privacy policies and laws in the US.

NSA spying is terrible, and must stop, but many companies slurp way too much data, and store it sloppily. Look at the number of password database leaks, and that's stuff that they want to keep secret.

The lack of sensible privacy regulation has already caused many companies to not send data to the US.

RRRA• 13 years ago

Let's keep the loss above the NSA's budget so they can rationalize their stupidity with the only thing they understand: $

vinceguidry• 13 years ago

Between patent trolls and the NSA, if I'm going to start the software business I've always wanted to start anytime soon, I'll find anywhere else to do it other than here in the 'good ole' USA.

vellum• 13 years ago

There haven’t been any real political consequences to supporting surveillance. Who’s lost an election over it? Until that happens, expect this to continue. It’s like how now one gets fired for buying IBM. The politicians are worried that if they did support rollback, and then some event happened, they’d get primaried out of office.

malandrew• 13 years ago

    "International anger over the National Security Agency’s Internet 
    surveillance is...and setting back U.S. efforts to promote Internet 
    freedom."

What?! A surveilled Internet is not a free Internet.

    'Salgado said. “This could have severe unintended consequences, such 
    as a reduction in data security, increased cost, decreased 
    competitiveness, and harm to consumers.”"

Uncorrected surveillance activity by the NSA likely will result in "unintended consequences, such as a reduction in data security, increased cost, decreased competitiveness, and harm to consumers"

Overall very strange journalism here.

NSA Spying Risks $35 Billion in U.S. Technology Sales

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