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

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.