“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,” Nicole Gaouette reports for Bloomberg News. “Disclosures of spying abroad may cost U.S. companies as much as $35 billion in lost revenue through 2016 because of doubts about the security of information on their systems, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a policy research group in Washington whose board includes representatives of companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Intel Corp.”
“Any setback in the U.S. push to maintain an open Internet also could inflict indirect damage on companies such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. that benefit from global networks with few national restrictions,” Gaouette reports. “Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s largest maker of computer-networking equipment, said this month that the NSA disclosures are causing some hesitation among customers in emerging markets.”
“News about U.S. surveillance disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has ‘the great potential for doing serious damage to the competitiveness’ of U.S. companies such as Cupertino, California-based Apple, Facebook Inc., and Microsoft Corp., Richard Salgado, Google’s director for law enforcement and information security, told a U.S. Senate panel Nov. 13. ‘The trust that’s threatened is essential to these businesses,'” Gaouette reports. “The uproar in Germany will probably hurt Akamai Technologies Inc.’s business there, according to Tom Leighton, chief executive officer of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that helps corporate customers deliver online content faster. ‘It’s clearly bad for American companies,’ Leighton said Nov. 20 at ‘The Year Ahead: 2014,’ a two-day conference in Chicago hosted by Bloomberg LP. ‘It’s particularly bad now in Germany, where it’s really being played up, to whip up anti-American corporate sentiment. We’ll probably lose some business there.'”
“A survey by the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group, found that 10 percent of its non-U.S. members have canceled contracts with U.S.-based cloud providers since May. Fifty-six percent said they’d be less likely to use one,” Gaouette reports. “‘People aren’t going to trust the U.S. and U.S. companies as much,’ said Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based policy group. ‘You’re going to see national boundaries begin in cyberspace.’ …Google’s Salgado said international reaction to the NSA’s surveillance risks changing the nature of the Internet. He said proposals being advanced could lead to the ‘creation of a splinter net, broken up into smaller national regional pieces with barriers around it to replace the global Internet that we know today.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Karma.
United States Constitution, Amendment IV:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Join The Electronic Frontier Foundation in calling for a full congressional investigation here.
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