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Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

• brown9-2 13y ago
  The author is guilty of thinking that the president is King, as if the entire federal government and all three branches weren't behind these things for that past 7 years.
  • JamisonM 13y ago
    The headline "Has the US Government's History of Acting Against its own Stated Values in the Protection of Civil Liberties and Privacy" is not nearly punchy enough to attract the desired clicks though. The window ain't just 7 years, it stretches a lot further back than that.
• runn1ng 13y ago
  No. Because most people don't care about privacy that much. See TSA scanners, foursquare, hell GMail scans your data everytime you read mails, Facebook doesn't even pretend there is a privacy. Damn, first thing any Apple computer do is taking your picture, getting your details and sending it all to Cupertino, before you even load the OS. Android tries to track all your phones under one account you have to add before starting up. People don't really care about privacy. (Disclaimer: I am no better.) There will be some anti NSA rallies, sure. Photos of those rallies will be geotagged with EXIF data and posted on tumblr, facebook and twitter from iphones and androids.
  • yen223 13y ago
    So true. The real danger here is that it's now easier for foreign governments to justify censoring the web, to "protect us against US invasion of privacy" or something.
    • Ziomislaw 13y ago
      I certainly wouldn't mind if PSA[1] got cut off of the rest of internet. [1]: Police State of America
  • coopdog 13y ago
    I don't care about privacy for my personal (not corporate) information from Google. The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them. I do care about that an organisation with the power to legally kill or imprison me without trial, with the world's strongest military and a penchant for punishing anyone who embarasses them has all of my data, including who I associate with, what I say and whereever I go. In fact not just my data, the data of their political opponents and the journalists that keep the system honest. If not Obama, someone at the head of the table is going to abuse this information one day.
    • rayiner 13y ago
      > The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them. No, the worst thing that Google,[1] can do is share that information with credit card companies, HR departments, health insurance companies, etc, who do have the power to ruin your life and are much more likely to do it than the government. What happens when the advertising money hits the wall and can't support revenue growth sufficient to keep the Wall Street analysts happy? At some point some MBA is going to figure out that HR departments would love to be notified about e.g. their employees joining say a cancer support page. It sounds inconceivable today, but I bet people who started using credit cards in the 1960's and 1970's never expected that one day the various credit organizations would band together and sell your information to literally everyone, so that you could be denied a job because of your credit history. I think it's important to keep some perspective, and I feel like people on HN aren't doing that here when they direct all their blame to the government over this issue and hold Google, Facebook, etc, who created this surveillance apparatus, blameless. Corporate America is much more likely to screw you over than the government. They have a profit motive to do so, and can get away with screwing you over on a mass scale in a way the government cannot. I don't know a single person who has been screwed over by the government. I do know people who have been screwed over by credit ratings agencies, having job offers revoked because they struggled financially in college. Maybe it's not inevitable or even very likely that Google and Facebook will sell your information to the highest bidder. But it's a failure of imagination not to pretend that it isn't possible, and if we're going to engage in slippery slope reasoning with respect to the NSA, let's be intellectually honest and admit that we've built a vast surveillance apparatus in both the public and the private sector, and there are numerous entities within both sectors who have the ability and perhaps the motive to use that information to hurt you. [1] Or Facebook or whatever. It doesn't matter. One day these companies will become mature and will be headed by some MBA who has never written a line of code...
  • locusm 13y ago
    My personal experience with reselling Google Apps here in Australia is quite different, privacy of data is almost always the first or second question they ask. I also rejoiced at AWS coming to Sydney, but having servers physically located in Australia does nothing to protect data by law from the US Govt.
• eksith 13y ago
  No, because only those who were on the fence were swayed either way. As of right now, the Poll on how the HN community will respond ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846564 ) is at : No, I'm ok with it 66 I'd like to do something but it's too difficult to avoid using cloud services 195 I'm going to try to use services from non-US companies hosted outside the US 99 I'm only going to use services that allow client side encryption. 37 I'm going to host all my own services. 47 I'm not changing anything because I already assumed all of my data was being monitored anyway. 151 A quick glance at what the rest of the public is thinking is quite illuminating as well. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0609/How-do-Americans-feel-about-NSA-surveillance-Ambivalent http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0609/How-do-Ame... Summary: People think in terms of "Privacy is a bit like oil. It's getting pricey, but I still like my SUV." If anything, it may give a much needed boost to an existing sector of internet industry, privacy and security. I see several companies springing up (some already have) that delivery end-to-end encrypted communication and storage over different media (of course, there would be plenty of Snake Oil as well). The real frontier of communication is the transmission of anonymized and encrypted data with services bought and paid for anonymously as well with no repercussions for the service providers.
  • nhebb 13y ago
    I doubt it will have much of an impact, but I'd be reluctant to make a prediction about international growth based on an HN survey and a CS Monitor article that references American polling data.
    • eksith 13y ago
      Fair enough. My gut feeling is about the same on impact of international growth. On one hand it may have been a blessing in disguise. The Internet is supposed to be global in the first place, but we have massive over-representation in pretty much every aspect of its commercial operation. The same services outside U.S. jurisdiction and influence are suddenly more alluring.
  • 13y ago
• qntmfred 13y ago
  No I don't think Obama did anything.
  • starchitect 13y ago
    How's that hole in the sand? Seeing anything good down there?
    • csdreamer7 13y ago
      Couldn't agree more.
  • sage_joch 13y ago
    Given that civil liberties were such a big part of his 2008 campaign, the best case scenario you describe is still a bit of a problem. I'm actually pretty angry at him right now. I donated a lot to his campaign in 2008 based on his focus on civil liberties, and he has only escalated everything I disliked about Bush. (And yes, I realize he made some questionable votes in the Senate before the 2008 election. I told myself it was what he had to do to get elected. By the 2012 election I had wised up and voted third party.)
  • bdcravens 13y ago
    A core principle of politics is that you're responsible for everything that happens on your watch. If you don't believe that, go listen to the past 40 years of broadcasted debates, and count the number of things that the opponent didn't personally do but was called to account for.
  • throwaway9848 13y ago
    I swear, it's like nobody ever read the USA PATRIOT act, even though its been law for 12 years. Obama's fault? For what, following the laws that Congress passed?
• kcorbitt 13y ago
  I don't think it will have that big an impact. The thing is that the grassroots organizers in other countries who care most about government spying tend to live in countries with much more meddling than that which the US government has demonstrated through PRISM. So compared to a locally-run service, keeping data in the US cloud is likely still much safer. I don't see Google handing over an activist's email logs to the Turkish government, whereas an email service based in Turkey could be strongarmed into it. A legitimate, non-rhetorical question: does an activist in Turkey care whether the US government reads his/her emails, as long as they don't share them with Turkey?
• jfoutz 13y ago
  Betteridge's law in action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
  • parennoob 13y ago
    I don't see why this is the most downvoted option. It does seem on point that the piece doesn't have any hard polling data about worldwide reactions to the recent NSA revelations, and the stuff about alternative services mostly refer to Chinese competitors, who are large players locally, but not worldwide. Hence, you'd think Betteridge's law was applicable. No?
    • jfoutz 13y ago
      I never noticed till someone pointed the law out on HN this year. IMHO the trailing question mark is almost always lazy writing.
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    Just for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5852146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5852146
    • jfoutz 13y ago
      That is brilliant. I still think headlines with question marks are cowardly writing. Be bold! Take a stand! Come right out and say Betteridge's law is bullshit. I kinda get the socratic effect the author is going for, but i still think it's a cheap trick. I didn't ask that question, the author did.
• raganwald 13y ago
  It's odd, I hear people saying, "no big deal, nothing will change." But then I wonder, if you're saying it's no big deal, are you an American or not? The point of this pst is that foreign business will be affected, AFAICT, Europeans have always held the Internet to a stricter standard than Americans and have passed stricter laws around everything from what data can be retained to the behaviour of tracking cookies. If you've posted a "no big deal" comment, can you please go back and tell us whether you are an American or not.
  • noerps 13y ago
    On consumers I would not expect much change to any other non-us service that keeps you invested and locked-in. There simply are no alternatives, some european services are currently shutting down. Even Schneier is stating that if you aren't connected with us social media, you simply stop to exist for certain groups of people. That rule applies to nearly every european user too.
  • davros 13y ago
    I think its a big deal. I'm not American. I don't think things will change - at first. The leading US internet companies are all built on a foundation of trust. Undermining that trust counterbalances the convenience of their services and over time new competitors without these trust problems are only a click away.
  • skylan_q 13y ago
    It's odd, I hear people saying, "no big deal, nothing will change." But then I wonder, if you're saying it's no big deal, are you an American or not?" There is a fear of having guns taken, but there is an even greater fear of using them against the regime.
  • tippytop 13y ago
    I think it will change things; I'm an American. Having your customers trust is important for business---now data stored offshore has just become a feature.
    • 13y ago
• starchitect 13y ago
  The biggest problem with this article is that the only competitors the author can find who might supplant the US ones are located in China. Don't see US tech hegemony fading anytime soon, Prism or no Prism.
• purephase 13y ago
  Nothing will change. If you think that those involved were not prepared for the eventually of a leak, you'd be very naive. The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes. Contingency plans have been put in place for this eventuality and the people making these plans are experts at dealing with these situations. My guess is that the gameplan for the US government will be to stay silent and wait for general apathy to sink back in. Tomorrow is WWDC and, with the latest Apple news, the tech community rally will likely fall to 2-3 page in a week or so and then disappear altogether. Once that happens, the difficulty moving to alternate services (as per the other HN poll) will shadow everything, and the company bottom lines will be unaffected. Add to that, if you believe that the US government and institutions are the only ones doing this, that would be even more naive. The Mossad, SIS, CSIS, KGB etc. are likely implementing very similar policies and procedures, if not directly involved with PRISM (or whatever it is actually called) and the outsourcing companies providing it. The likelihood of finding other territorial based services with capability, scale in an area not under surveillance is probably close to impossible. The Arab Spring was a wake-up call to all governments/multi-nationals that these tools are power in the hands of the general public and steps were taken to mitigate and reduce this effectiveness. It's depressing. I wish it were otherwise. I wish the companies involved actually had the ability to push back or outright deny involvement in these types of actions, but I suspect their hands were tied. Silicon Valley is entrenched. We like to think that it is still our playground but we should know better. My only hope is that this time we learn and that brighter people than I figure out what we can do about it.
  • danilocampos 13y ago
    > The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes. Can you show your work on this? How would we know this?
    • obstacle1 13y ago
      A bunch of people compared ~9 of the companies' statements in a past thread. They are all identical in structure, form, and style, with only minor differences like differing adjectives and emphases. They all also beat the exact same terminology to death. Namely, "direct access".
• ritchiea 13y ago
  One biggie that the author left out of the piece: The US Gov continues to insist that they are not monitoring the data of US citizens because that would be unconstitutional without warrants. But that's a tacit admission that they are openly monitoring the data of non-US citizens. I think this is one of the most important revelations of this leak, the US Gov has made it clear that if you are a non US citizen using a web service based in the US your data is definitely under observation.
  • zainny 13y ago
    As an Australian, that's what I found most interesting as well about all the commentary going on. From the perspective of the NSA it seems my data is fair game under any and all circumstances. Well fuck that. Google, Amazon, et al. - I'm out
    • dsowers 13y ago
      Good luck. I don't see other countries innovating at even half the rate of the U.S. with tech stuff. Leaving the umbrella will be like turning out the lights. It gets boring and cold in the dark after a while.
      • ashray 13y ago
        That's possibly because of a few advantages that US companies had due to quicker exposure to leading edge technology. However, when privacy becomes a unique selling point that US corporations can no longer provide - suddenly the competition will see a reason to appear. I'm on the lookout for reasonably good Google apps alternatives, if they don't exist right now - this is a time that a solid market just got created. I'm sure someone out there will be interested in making it happen!
        • zainny 13y ago
          Agreed. I see this as being a catalyst for the creation of greater competition to the US internet incumbents. There will likely not be an immediate impact for Google et al. but there will be much longer term consequences I think.
• parennoob 13y ago
  I'm not sure how common this is on this site, but I happen to be an HN reader the vast majority of whose friends in the US and across the world don't know or follow technology/security stuff. Out of my 600-odd 'friends' on Facebook, one (1) is posting stuff about the NSA allegations. The other 599, are posting pictures of cats, music videos, snaps from vacation, reflections about life, et cetera. I myself am extremely reticent about posting on Facebook due to the recent revelations. As a result, I am afraid Edward Snowdon's fears might come to pass, atleast in the short run. Not enough people care. They crave the short-term dopamine bursts that result from people liking their posts, or pictures, or videos. Getting them to set that aside and care about the fact that the Government might potentially have access to it all is a very, very hard task. In order to do this, you have to get people to switch en masse to new, secure social protocols. In short, you have to build a Facebook alternative, an client-side encrypted webmail service, or a document sharing site that JustWorks, is secure, and doesn't require any terminal commands to access / run. Otherwise the majority of the population is going to use products from Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. You can use your encrypted webmail and identi.ca, but very few people outside the "tech-aware" world will communicate with you.
  • noerps 13y ago
    I really concur and like to add there are now one or two generations of young adults and their kids out there, who have never even considered privacy (as in non-exhibitionism).
• decasteve 13y ago
  I'm Canadian. I'll be locking down my communications as best I can: email (GPG), instant messaging, chat, etc. I'd like to see my American neighbours do the same and hold their politicians feet the fire over this. I feel like I should boycott the US companies on the list, at least to some degree. I have made the switch to DuckDuckGo and Mozilla. A Blackberry, as opposed to Android, will be my next smartphone. As a developer I'll be dropping my iOS support in the coming weeks. I haven't used a Microsoft product, including Skype, in a long time (exclusively Linux). I will likely phase out Google Drive and Gmail as well. Not sure how many of my compatriots will follow suit or if that will have an impact financially. There are lots of recommendations out there now to lock-down your browser, e.g. adblock/https/etc, if you haven't already. If this becomes mainstream then advertisers like Google may take a hit. I'll be emailing my member of parliament (MP) to make sure we keep tabs on this in Canada, and keep our privacy laws intact.
  • devb 13y ago
    How do you plan on telling everyone you communicate with, "I'm sorry, this channel is unencrypted, this conversation cannot continue." Why aren't companies scrambling to provide a plug-in encryption product? Forget Google's default https, I want easy end user encryption.
  • wildmXranat 13y ago
    Same here. Ill be looking to expedite my move off of gmail, yahoo, rackspace etc. It's a shame , but it has to be done. I'm doing some active research into sending an effective letter my my MP as well as I would like to have it as much weight as possible.
  • geoka9 13y ago
    > I'll be emailing my member of parliament (MP) to make sure we keep tabs on this in Canada, and keep our privacy laws intact. openmedia.org seems to have done a good job campaigning against the Online Spying Bill.
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• shirro 13y ago
  I think most people with some technical savvy have already concluded that everything on the Internet is potentially subject to surveillance, both government and corporate. You can mitigate the impact on your privacy to some extent by going offline or using crypto but not totally. People need to choose what to share, when and with whom. The people who are loudly shouting on social media about the evils of government interception are still shouting on social media where everything they have ever said or done is able to be mined and analysed. Nothing really has changed except perhaps the perceptions of the naive.
• jval 13y ago
  This is a huge deal. I live in Australia and I have been running businesses on the cloud for the last 3 years or so. I have rarely heard the issue of the PATRIOT Act raised and in spite of there being laws banning the transfer of personal data outside Australia, most people are quite lax about the issue and take the view that the risks are too small to be counted. Those days are most certainly over. This stuff will affect companies like AWS and Rackspace the most, given that they are competing for contracts with companies who are seriously concerned about who can get at their data. I imagine nobody will flaunt the laws in Australia regarding international data transfers in future, and that countries where no such laws exist will enact some very quickly. Any cloud based software company in the US which holds large amounts of data that could in any way be deemed to be sensitive is going to have a much harder time pitching to clients overseas who will increasingly opt for a decent local alternative over a foreign one should the option exist. The only thing that American companies can hope for otherwise is that there is no foreign alternative. The world is not going to come to an end but for a lot of people, their jobs are about to get much harder and the government should be worried about this.
  • vertis 13y ago
    I'm, also in Australia. NB: It's a real struggle to not make this sound paranoid. Just at an individual level, I'm questioning whether it's wise to store my data in a US service that won't afford me the same protection as US citizens. I've already started reducing my reliance on Google, and I barely use facebook, but things like Amazon and Linode are much harder for me to quickly divorce myself from.
    • chewxy 13y ago
      If you're willing to pay a bit more, there are companies like Ninefold But then again, that is just talk. I still use AWS and Linode religiously. The prices are really hard to beat
    • aragot 13y ago
      > I'm questioning whether it's wise to store my data in a US service It definitely isn't, and I'm wondering why this issue wasn't on top of your mind before that?
• dreamfactory 13y ago
  I think it will impact B2B e.g. big/sensitive projects will be much less inclined to use Skype.
• buzu 13y ago
  I live in the UK and for me this is a big deal. While this issue was always in the back of my mind, I never had concrete proof that this was happening. Now that my fears have been answered, I shall think twice before buying any cloud space on US companies servers. I will be speaking to my colleagues on the effects this will on our existing data and how will this effect the trust with our customers. I think this is a huge deal.
• bifrost 13y ago
  I don't think he's capable of destroying it, but he's certainly set things back quite a ways. We've known about domestic internet spying for quite some time, but its definately gotten bigger and badder under the current administration. I hope people finally will stop with the "oh but nobody is looking at my stuff" attitude, because now they know BigBrother(tm) is watching.
• rdl 13y ago
  IMO it should be a much bigger deal for totally commodity services (IMAP/SMTP, file storage, etc.) vs. "unique" services (it's not like you could run your own Facebook server in Iceland...)
  • notimetorelax 13y ago
    There are local social networks, to give an example from Russia: vk.com, odnoklassniki.ru, etc. And these are more popular than Facebook.
    • rdl 13y ago
      Social networks aren't commodities, especially once your set of friends are on them.
      • notimetorelax 13y ago
        You're right, what I meant with my comment was that for may countries Facebook is not the only social network. Many people are active in multiple networks and some of these social networks have no ties to the US, hence if users outside of the US decide to move away from Facebook it won't be that hard to do.
• etherael 13y ago
  Another data point, I have used a ton of cloud services from US companies in the past with an attitude of not really being comfortable with it based on a belief that something like what was discovered was probably happening but it was just too damned convenient and easy to ignore. I still made efforts to secure what mattered, like truecrypt containers on dropbox et al, but at the end of the day I just shouldn't have played the game at all. Lending economic support to this kind of behaviour is not acceptable. I'm conflicted about this because I'm convinced that generally speaking, Dropbox and Google and various other companies that have no other choice than to behave in this way are otherwise really worth supporting. I am as we speak setting up dedicated hosting with encrypted storage and obfuscated service paths to migrate all my existing services onto something I can reliably control, starting with gmail and dropbox. I really should have just done this a long time ago, but it becoming abundantly clear that my suspicions were completely justified pushed me over the edge.
• gulfie 13y ago
  No, this sort of thing has been going on long before Obama. If anything he will just be the one that got unlucky enough to be in charge when people found out some of the details.
• Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
  Nothing new at all, history just repeating itself. Everything mentioned in this article was already assumed by people. I did laugh when they aid we don't do domestic spying. I think they don't know in US how many people in the world are living outside the all mighty US. Maybe it's just bad geography and limited national political thinking.
• asperous 13y ago
  The good news is, if we make this a big deal and companies start to feel the pressure, we'll have millions of lobbying dollars on our side.
• kjackson2012 13y ago
  Is it true that Google does not protect the rights of non-US users from having their emails read and copied by the NSA? If that is the case, then why would any foreigner ever use Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc?
  • Ziomislaw 13y ago
    because they are uninformed
• einhverfr 13y ago
  I am an American and I just want to point out that my latest startup (http://www.efficito.com http://www.efficito.com) is a Limited UK company, and my co-founder is from the Netherlands. It would certainly be to my advantage if things change. We offer cloud-based ERP, and you might be interested to know our main hosting server is currently in the Czech Republic. We are also paranoid about security (all access is encrtpted, and we are looking at encrypted storage for virtual machines, and much more). I would love for things to change. I really would. What I worry though is about attention span of even decision makers on the business side, and what the alternatives are. The ideal situation would be a bunch of smaller private social networks able to interop (the Diaspora model) but it isn't clear there is a financial way to make this work. So I hope it changes. I really do. I just am somewhat pessimistic :-P
  • buro9 13y ago
    I'm a UK citizen with a startup http://microco.sm http://microco.sm that has gone to some lengths to avoid US domains, companies and laws. All of our domains are EU based, the company is UK based, and whilst we've used Linode for blog and basic site-hosting and will use Cloudflare for CDN, we are putting nothing on the server of a US company that could be a risk to privacy. All of our data we are keeping within the EU which we feel holds much better standards and has stricter laws on data protection, and for user-generated content we feel that the EU E-commerce Act is better than the DMCA and risk created by the copyright lobby in the US. Ultimately what this means is that for our core data and API, European companies with no US parent or holding company will win our hosting business. We will still use US companies, but in a way that is little more than transport and performance increases for US-based users. But even then, we are not requiring real identity and we are implementing SSL everywhere and are happy if users use VPNs or Tor to connect. Why all the fuss? I believe that through a persons' interests one can determine political affiliation. So I believe that to allow people to organise themselves freely around their hobbies and pastimes, that we must consider this and protect them from any entities that might use that information against the individuals. Further I believe that when people of shared interest come together that they are likely to organise to protect and preserve that interest, and this means that interest groups galvanise ad-hoc lobby groups and activists. I also hope it changes, but I'm going to act as if I believe it will get worse on all fronts.
• warrick 13y ago
  What does this have to do with Obama? Genuine question, the article doesn't say. I thought this was a consequence of the Patriot Act.
• u2328 13y ago
  I think 'destroyed' is a strong word, and it's still early. Damaged? That's probably fair. I wonder if that's a major reason the Google-centric 'The Internship' movie kinda bombed this weekend. I mean, it might just be a crappy movie (didn't see the reviews), but I do suspect a lot of people weren't really into seeing a movie about Google after all this.
  • psbp 13y ago
    The average movie-goer wouldn't make the association unless the story were in the headlines for weeks, maybe months, on end. It just doesn't look like a great movie.
    • u2328 13y ago
      Heh, you're probably right.
• u2328 13y ago
  Hey Europeans, does this mean your love affair with Skype is over?
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • drdaeman 13y ago
    Say, Skype is as private as talking in a crowded place (i.e. there's no privacy at all). Yet, we still talk outdoors. So, I doubt Skype will get out of business. Sad but true.
• zmmmmm 13y ago
  One of the rather interesting side issues in this whole debate has been how casually the rights of foreigners are tossed aside as secondary to those of american citizens. There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else. While I understand that this is largely because the legality of the spying hinges on whether US citizens are subject to it, I still find it a rather fascinating aspect.
  • siculars 13y ago
    Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.
    • DannyBee 13y ago
      This is likely the root of the issue, which is that they probably capture all communications, but when they have a foreign target, that is when they actually "look" at the stuff they captured, trying to find stuff "related" to that foreign target. The NSA at least was supposedly run as a very tight ship (I have no idea now, i have no friends who have worked there recently), so I'm sure they theoretically have really detailed redaction and other procedures meant to keep personal or private info of americans from appearing in reports, but that is not exactly comforting.
      • Ziomislaw 13y ago
        I do not think any decent human being has friends THERE.
    • jmadsen 13y ago
      That's what I've been wondering: - if they aren't targeting specific persons, how do they know what country the person is from & if they (the govt) are violating the law? - if I'm American living in another country, am I safer from or more likely to be tracked (terrorism aside) Am I being picked up "freely" as someone from outside the country? - many, many, many similar questions I'm sure you are also asking I realize these seem rather naive questions, but my first thought on reading Obama's response was, "How can you possibly know what country the person is a citizen of?" Considering that that was a major part of his defense - "Don't worry, it's only those foreign people we're looking at"- I really think that needs to be a bigger part of the whole discussion. I think it is quite obviously more bullshit.
• downandout 13y ago
  While I actually hope that the predictions in this article come true, as people should not put their data at risk by allowing it to pass through the US at this point, I am pessimistic that anything will change. I was sure that seizure of overseas internet poker domains, on the basis that .com domains are controlled by an American organization, would have been enough to drastically reduce .com registrations. That didn't happen. People have a tendency not to care about things until it directly smacks them in the face, and then it's too late.
• iframe 13y ago
  Now I'm looking for a decentralized social network
• AlexeiSadeski 13y ago
  A minor correction in terminology: The US Constitution and case law makes no distinction between protections granted to US citizens and foreigners. All are treated equally under the law, and thusly "enjoy" the same "protections." However, case law has determined that such protections are not granted outside of the US's borders. Thus, an American citizen and a foreigner have equal protection (again, in theory) when inside of US borders - and both are equally unprotected when outside of US borders (it's a bit more complex regarding the 'outside of US borders' part, but that's the general gist).
• andyl 13y ago
  So much of internet business rides on trust. Yes, this is gonna damage the US Internet industry. If you're selling cloud-based services in overseas markets, your non-American competitors just got a big helping hand.
• deleted 13y ago
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• petercooper 13y ago
  Chicken Little, is that you?
• Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
  Similar actions has been affecting other businesses earlier: "Due to this, Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera has, as of June 5, 2008, moved their Sonera (Finnish) e-mail servers out of Sweden, as Finnish law requires communication to be confidential. They have also transferred Swedish customers from Finnish to Swedish servers, to prevent Sweden-to-Sweden e-mail from crossing the border."
• kjeldsendk 13y ago
  It's safe to say that if i find a real alternative to Google Apps i will be moving a few hundred people away from Google Apps. Right now we just have to live with the 1984 feeling.
• Yuioup 13y ago
  How much of it was Bush rather than Obama?
• mtgx 13y ago
  This is the Europeans' "big break", and they need to take advantage of it. Hopefully they won't resolve around UK, because it's probably just as bad at this. Maybe Germany can be the center of innovation in Europe. At least they have some pretty strong laws and strict judges, and citizens can even create their own laws and referendums.
• taktix 13y ago
  Nowhere in the world can you escape from US omniscient powers nowadays, and I can't help think this may be the prophesied New World Order (or if you're a Christian, the "Great Abominable Church"). It's imperialism via information, and US corporations are the foot soldiers.
• D9u 13y ago
  There went that fabled "moral high ground," right out the window. This government wants to keep increasingly more secrets from its populace, while simultaneously decreasing our rights to secrecy. More of the double standard which widens the gap between "We the People" and the ruling classes.
• kriro 13y ago
  Here's two high level pitches someone should go and try to validate: "Like Google with strong data protection." "Like Facebook with strong data protection." Feel free to send me some of your billions later. I think there's some outrage now but by and large most citizens don't really care as long as there's some justification they can buy (ZOMG gotta protect us against those terrorists). Yes it's a sad state of affairs but that's what it is. If I'm wrong on that the US has just created a pretty sweet incentive for European/Other entrepreneurs to grab a good chunk of the silicon valley business.
• caycep 13y ago
  Not sure about Obama, but maybe Snowden did just for the timing and the linking in the public mind with these companies. For those who've been keeping track of this, this isn't all that entirely new - I mean articles going back over the past few decades in the Washington Post, at least 3 NYT bestsellers by James Bamford, what more do you really need in terms of "revelations"? My general gist of it was that the NSA probably was scooping packets somehow, and if they really wanted to get you, they could. Somehow, this time, the story got traction. I agree w/ the general consensus that it's about damn time. The Mil Industrial Complex will keep rolling on w/ "Top Secret-creep" and "Surveilance-creep" until a proper re-evaluation of the Church reforms and the Patriot act and other contributory/relevant legislation for this day and age is conducted, and enforced. I am hoping the earlier "All wars must end" speech on the part of Obama is hinting at a step in this direction. Of note, it was probably worse pre-internet, when the NSA could just scoop radio signals out of the air...networked communications made it much harder for them - at least temporarily. Also with SIGINT, the NSA is joined at the hip by the UK, Canada, AUS and NZ...the NSA technically could avoid spying domestically by sending intel requests to their counterpart agencies...
• richardw 13y ago
  I've been wondering about this. The U.S. will be considered the anti-Switzerland with respect to our privacy. If you want your data safe, don't store it in the U.S. Next question: how are Google etc treating my data when my own government wants to know what I say about them? Do they also bend over backwards to set up portals for different levels of ally, or are foreign citizens safer from their own governments than US citizens are from theirs?
• foxylad 13y ago
  "destroy" is hyperbole, but it's certainly going to have a chilling effect. We can't ignore the elephant in the room any longer - our utopian global human internet is actually just a US government controlled plaything. My company provides a service to the government sector in Australia, hosted on Google's Appengine. We've been negotiating a blanket deal with a government department, and I can see that we're going to have to answer some very hard questions about the security of their data after this. Winning this deal would make a ten-fold increase in hosting costs irrelevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they even offered to pay us more to host in Australia just for their peace of mind. Most of us learn as kids how asymmetrical trust is, and how once you're caught lying no-one believes your apologies or promises to mend your ways. Before PRISM, it was only the cynics muttering about how the US Government saw everything we did. Post PRISM, most non-US companies (and probably many US companies too) will be looking for neutral alternatives to US services. And Richard Stallman... proved right yet again!
• konstruktor 13y ago
  While consumers may be too lazy to care, cloud providers will lose a lot of business. You can bet that every trade magazine outside the US will have articles discussing if it is even legal to store data with US providers given the particular country's regulation and the information we have.
  • 1morepassword 13y ago
    That's already been a common discussion for many years. The business world outside the US is very much aware of the problem. What we're likely to see now is article discussing how to get out of the US cloud, because it has now shifted from a potential legal issue to a commercial selling point. Even clients with "nothing to hide" will start asking questions about where the data is stored. Not so much because they're worried about the US looking at their data, but because they want to know how well we as their service provider take care of their data.
• 1morepassword 13y ago
  The damage was already done well before that. Individuals may not care that much (so Facebook is relatively safe), but businesses and governments have already been well aware that storing their data in US-run services is a bad idea, and in many ways not even legal because of existing privacy and security related regulations. If you for instance store sensitive medical data, you can't do that somewhere where the US government may get access to it whenever they want (warrant or not btw, unless that warrant is server to you and not your service American provider). Many of us are looking at ways of backing out or staying out of US services for the potential legal complications alone. This may accelerate things, but to most it was already clear: if you have any kind of liability concerning the data you store and process, you can't use American online services. The question "does your product use American services?" will be asked with increasing frequency. Also, having "no" as an answer is a good selling point in many markets.
• SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  > "American companies have overwhelmingly dominated it. They have done so with astonishing innovation and technical achievement. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype..." Skype was in no sense an American company until it was sold, first to eBay and then to MS
• Smrchy 13y ago
  I live i Germany. And whenever we try to sell cloud-based services to our customers there is this group of people that are not comfortable with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. They like to keep data in their own racks on their own servers. The standard reply is to call it FUD and talk about all the advantages the cloud has. It will be a lot harder to win an argument against them now that everybody knows that data which is stored in the U.S. is free bait for the NSA to play with. It's no longer fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's just fear now.
• locusm 13y ago
  Whats interesting here in Australia is that mainstream press are largely ignoring this story. The number one story on news.com.au right now is "How the fabulously rich kids travel" - cant wait to read that! The Ed Snowden story is way down the page.
• DominikR 13y ago
  It is sad for me to see the course that the US and the European governments have taken in the recent years. My company (a small european provider of mobile telephony and chat) has to store all traffic that is going over our service during the last six months for the government, which may request that data. They didn't yet try to get that data in bulk, but I am pretty sure that we will see that happen in the near future. And there will be nothing that we can do about it as a small company if we want to stay in business and out of prison. I believe that at some point this will harm IT business, which hopefully will also cause the government to rethink their strategy, but I am afraid of how far they will have to go before they come to this realization. In 1998 (as a 17 year old boy) I was able to board a plane in London to Vienna without passport. (because I've lost it during my trip) Today I have to give fingerprints and other biometric data like a criminal just to get a new passport. Tomorrow maybe it will be a standard procedure that robots do a body cavity search on me before boarding a plane. It is funny that I, as a tech enthusiast, am hoping that I wont see the kind of progress in robotics during my lifespan, that enables them to do anal probing at scale in airports.
• nacho2sweet 13y ago
  I worked at a University in Canada, and we had a no USA hosted services policy from day one of that Patriot Act. Not everyone knew about it or followed it but if an IT department was involved in development we had to enforce it. It was really frustrating for me a lot of times because I couldn't design new useful solutions or suggest products like SurveyMonkey for example that would save everyone huge amounts of time. This is totally the kind of thing that is going to happen to a lot of businesses now that less technical people that are higher up are aware of these issues. They are going to get a little fearful and mandate certain services are a no go.
• Vivtek 13y ago
  No, because none of these laws have been enacted in the Obama administration. And yes, because Candidate Obama said he was going to fix things, then discovered other priorities once in office.
• Fuxy 13y ago
  I doubt many people will leave American companies real soon there are just not many good alternatives at the moment but given a choice between an American company and say one in a more privacy oriented country that advertises its position properly people may think twice. Nobody seems to mention that the intelligence agencies of the world deal with information and their not shy of selling it. Say for instance a revolution is brewing over Facebook in a country the US would like to keep as is how likely is it that the CIA would provide intelligence to that country to stop the revolution? Facebook may be a tool for revolution but it can be a tool to stop revolution as well and the US government gets to decide which one will it be. I'd rather they stay out of it and the only way to do that is to not use US services.
• bonchibuji 13y ago
  Baidu instead of Google Renren instead of Facebook Youku/Todou instead of Youtube Weibo instead of Twitter ---------------------------------- Yandex instead of Google VK instead of Facebook Only Beijing and Moscow saw this coming!
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• Mordor 13y ago
  Well, it's probably illegal for the US to sell its products in the EU. Certainly it's game over for the cloud industry.
• Cardeck1 13y ago
  Am I the only one who sees a tech-war coming in the next 10 years?I always suspected that as new tech arises the chances of seeing a war rises too.
• Cardeck1 13y ago
  This is child's play compared to the information they will gather from Google Glasses...Imagine what they could do with that...
• timedoctor 13y ago
  It makes a mockery of the concept of the US being the bastion of freedom and being an example to other countries.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• ansimionescu 13y ago
  This might answer the question in the title: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
  • ubernostrum 13y ago
    This is one of the most formulaic, most predictable comments on HN. It adds nothing to the discussion, offers no insight into the topic, and exists only as a cheap way to score magical internet points. Please do not post such comments again.
• blahbl4hblah 13y ago
  Yeah, it was Obama. He did it by himself. He just turned his evil black man powers on the internet industry and just blacked it all up. He did this because he is the entire federal government. Jesus.
• xradionut 13y ago
  Most of the comments are concerning politics and very little are concern the economics of smaller companies and individuals rejecting services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft. (Microsoft's TechEd had a big push towards Azure this last week. Their timing sucks... Sorry about their bad luck...)
• kailuowang 13y ago
  Was the industry just destroyed? That shouldn't be too hard a question to answer. A good indication is the stock market - so far all major U.S. Internet companies' stocks show no signs of collapsing (prices increased since the leak). If you think the market is wrong, it's good opportunity for you to cash in. It's also a good indication that the rulling class is not much concerned about this leak of PRISM at all.
• ttrreeww 13y ago
  It is now easy for any country to ban US based technologies in order to jump start their own tech industry. This is the beginning of the end of the US tech industry in general.
• msaint 13y ago
  No.
• asldkfj234 13y ago
  are non us people going to stop using microsoft windows, intel cpus, vmware... ? Wouldn't it make more sense for the nsa to bug these things ?