11 ms·

Revelations of N.S.A. Spying Cost U.S. Tech Companies

244 points by cottonseed 13y ago

ddlatham 13y ago
It's not the revelations that are costing the tech companies. It's the spying.
- gatehouse 13y ago
  Yeah, by the same logic, the NYT causes anguish by reporting on tragedies and disasters. EDIT: ALSO: > Despite the tech companies’ assertions that they provide information on their customers only when required under law — and not knowingly through a back door — the perception that they enabled the spying program has lingered Nobody cares if data leaks are intentional or legal. When China was suspected of backdooring routers in 2012 I don't recall anyone caring if it was intentional by the Chinese Tech Companies, or the legality of it if it was intentional. The Congress issued a report saying : Chinese telecommunications companies provide an opportunity for the Chinese government to tamper with the United States telecommunications supply chain. That said, understanding the level and means of state influence and control of economic entities in China remains difficult. As Chinese analysts explain, state control or influence of purportedly private-sector entities in China is neither clear nor disclosed.34 The Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, experts explain, can exert influence over the corporate boards and management of private sector companies, either formally through personnel choices, or in more subtle ways.35 As ZTE’s submission to the Committee states, “the degree of possible government influence must vary across a spectrum.”36 [...] Recommendation 2: Private-sector entities in the United States are strongly encouraged to consider the long-term security risks associated with doing business with either ZTE or Huawei for equipment or services. U.S. network providers and systems developers are strongly encouraged to seek other vendors for their projects. http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/Huawei-ZTE%20Investigative%20Report%20%28FINAL%29.pdf http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/f...
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > Yeah, by the same logic, the NYT causes anguish by reporting on tragedies and disasters. In some way it does. The side effect of all this reporting is population getting increasingly and predictably more stupid (availability heuristic, for starters) AND stressed at the same time.
    - smtddr 13y ago
      I'll take this one step further. Television news, at least mainstream TVnews in USA, is a totally stress/fear inducer purposely delivered in the most dramatic and usually shallow way possible, so you stick around for the commercials and at the same time the elists influence the viewers' political decisions. Almost everyone would be better off without it as it exists today.
- pekk 13y ago
  The charges would be equally effective if they were untrue. A lot of things HN has claimed about NSA really can't be substantiated, and that DOESN'T mean that I have to believe the HN position by default.
ihsw 13y ago
> [IBM] is spending $1.2 billion to build cloud computing centers around the world to lure foreign customers who are sensitive about the location of their data. IBM et al are still American companies, and until they're immune to American legislation (ie: FISA Section 702) then no-one will touch them with a fifty-foot ethernet cable. The location of the data is irrelevant. The US Government will not budge on this issue, and they will happily throw the entire tech industry under the bus. Bailing out Silicon Valley and nationalizing as much as possible is very appealing, too.
- techtalsky 13y ago
  I'm a little surprised this wasn't emphasized in the article. It doesn't matter where the equipment is: the us government can still secretly force you to backdoor it and lie to your customers and the press about it.
  - yulaow 13y ago
    For that there is the solution to create a company branch legally indipendent from the main one, so all the assets linked to it would be under the legislation of the state in which they are
    - bsder 13y ago
      Do you really think that IBM would jeopardize its enormous contracts with the US federal government because some subsidiary won't/can't get at data? You have a lot to learn.
      - oijaf888 13y ago
        Are IBM's US government contracts larger than all their foreign business?
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        Didn't they lose the CIA's cloud computing contract to Amazon? How much international business are you willing to lose for the harsh US government mistress?
dmix 13y ago
I'm happy NYTimes changed the headline. It used to say "Edward Snowden Leaks Cost US Tech Companies Millions" Now they properly changed it to NSA spying as the cause.
- ihsw 13y ago
  Read the title more closely -- the revelations are costing tech companies, not the spying itself.
noir_lord 13y ago
Good, if you engaged in the spying you deserve to be hurt. If you didn't then that is unfortunate but hopefully they'll apply pressure to those that did.
minimax 13y ago
The Forrester note† that the article links to is a little more balanced that the NYT article. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, here are some good quotes: It's naive and dangerous to think that the NSA's actions are unique. Nearly every developed nation on the planet has a similar intelligence arm which isn't as forthcoming about its procedures for requesting and gaining access to service provider (and ultimately corporate) data. As stated in the ITIF report, German intelligence has the G10 act which let's them monitor telecommunications traffic without a court order. The fact of the matter is that the IT services market is a part of our portfolios because it provides capabilities we value either against IT or business metrics. And it's highly likely these values are worth more to you than the potential risk you think your company faces due to government surveillance. And if your company is a prime target for government surveillance, you are probably being watched from within your own firewalls right now. ... you can take actions yourself to protect your data from prying eyes when using these services. A quick tip: bring your own encryption. If you hold the keys the governments can't get to your data by going through your service provider. †http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of_prism_will_be_larger_than_itif_projects http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of...
- buro9 13y ago
  For me, it's not about shifting data out of naivety that companies/users aren't being spied on everywhere. Instead it's about shifting data into a legal domain in which you hope to hold someone to account for intrusive spying. A non-US entity has zero chance of ever holding the government and agencies of the USA to account. And we're also aware that US companies can be forced by the US government or agencies to access data held (by them) overseas. But we do have some chance (fractionally above zero, I'm not deluding myself) of holding our own governments and companies within our legal domain to account. None of it is a substitute to encryption, but this isn't solved through tech alone.
  - dreamfactory2 13y ago
    It's not as if government spying prevents anyone else from doing it. And in any case, 'because it's happening anyway' is a terrible argument, you could just as well say that about any crime you care to mention.
arca_vorago 13y ago
The issue of foreseeable consequences is one of the main points I have a problem with. The public was sold war and surveillance to "protect" them, but lets face the realpolitik, it was about "National Interests" and not "National Security", which the totalitarian oligarchy like to conflate as the same. They aren't, but even if they were, they had to have had at least a few analysts in a dark room somewhere who figured this out and sent some reports up the chain. (of course they probably got fired or sent to the mail room...) They knew this was a possibility, that by turning on and growing the surveillance state and trying to kill privacy that it would increase the possibility that the programs would become public, and therefore undermine American credibility as a safe haven. I would present to you that, while they will claim they were unaware of this potential, the reality is that they knew it, and accepted it, because what has been happening is a power play in a currently fairly quiet but still major shift in global power. I've argued with my intel friends that they are off chasing bad guys OCONUS when the real bad guys are in DC, NY, and London, but now those same entities have a stranglehold on the intel agencies themselves (I mean, they always did, the original CIA guys were all Wall Street old boys in the first place, but now it's much worse in my opinion.) Do we really think Hayden is the brain behind these moves? Or Hanlon's razor? No. The surveillance issue is a symptom of a much larger issue at hand, and until we take the discourse to that level there will be very little progress made. All three branches and the fourth estate are corrupted, which undermines our entire already weakened constitutional framework. Now, the realpolitik they don't discuss with the public is that in the new globalized world of supranational entities the concept of national sovereignty is a lost cause. My problem is that they made the decision to adopt this constitution undermining policy without even having a public debate about it. The oligarchy have said, in essence: "The proletariat serfs are too dumb (from all the propaganda) to make informed decisions about their democracy, therefore, we shall placate them with gladiatorial political shows while we pull the strings from the shadows."
- cryoshon 13y ago
  The proliteriat are dumb because they're constantly stuffed with propaganda tailored to their low intelligence because it's assumed the proliteriat is dumb. It's circular reasoning used to rationalize the unbalanced locus of power.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
whyme 13y ago
How is it that IBM would gain business? They are still an American company which makes them equally susceptible to this form of data theft. I can't see handing my data over to IBM any more than I would Facebook or Amazon. Surely the article could have picked a better example.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  IBM could make their products verifiably secure. Open source client software. Web of trust. Making encryption the default. Any non-US competitor would have to do at least as much because NSA surveillance recognizes no borders. Against tier-1 state actors, everyone is on a level playing field. The question is, which nation's tech industry will be the first to decide that the only way to win is to not play the game?
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  In many cases, IBM will sell you hardware and software. They will help you install and set it up, but at the end of the process you own your data. It's not on some 'cloud' controlled by IBM, it's on a rack of IBM-branded servers in your own datacenter or server closet. The software is almost invariably some version of Linux, so you can audit it for security. Your question is like asking, "How can I trust that Western Digital won't turn over the data on my hard drive they sold me?" I suppose it's possible future revelations will show that all major software and hardware packages supported by US firms contain legally-mandated secret backdoors, but we're not that far down the rabbit hole yet.
  - whyme 13y ago
    I've done business with IBM at a corporate level and I assure you that's not what's happening here. It's the clients whom are buying services from IBM saying "whoa, I'm using your services, but I don't want our data falling into the US govt's hands", that they are addressing. IBM is appeasing these clients by telling them they'll locate their data elsewhere, yet there's quite a bit of data attached to and flowing into those services.
    - 13y ago
higherpurpose 13y ago
Finally, some good news!
- cottonseed 13y ago
  I have to agree. I'm very pessimistic about this whole situation, and this is one of the few forces I can see that could have some positive impact.
jobu 13y ago
"Even as Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowden’s leaks ..." That statement is a perfect example of the real problem with the US government and many journalists. They don't see the actual spying as the cause of all the backlash - it's all Snowden's fault for telling the world.
- roc 13y ago
  Political journalism in the US has been meta for so long, I don't think they even know the difference anymore.
  - ProAm 13y ago
    Politics and Journalism have always been a little 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'. They both need each other to exist, and yet feign like they can't stand each other at the same time.
    - illumen 13y ago
      Or with Murdoch it's BIG, not little. For example, after all Murdoch newspapers in Australia (which is most newspapers) went for one political party. That party won the election, and afterwards Murdoch got almost a billion $ tax cut from the government that was elected. Similar tactics are used all over the world, and he switches sides too.
  - psbp 13y ago
    It's been like this for a long time. A controversy will feed itself, the actual issues won't as easily be stuck in perpetuity. Even history is taught like this.
    - silentOpen 13y ago
      History is a narrative. Teaching is a narrative. Media is a narrative. Examining the root causes rather than the narrative fabric is rational. Most governmental actors are either intentionally or ignorantly not rational in this respect.
sixothree 13y ago
Personally I've been using fewer Google and other hosted services simply because they make me feel 'icky'. More and more I use startpage for general searches and tor for anything personal like medical information that I don't want in my permanent record.
- cottonseed 13y ago
  Same here. I'm almost completely off Google products. If you do keep using Google products, make sure you disable location and web tracking. I deleted my Facebook account. I switched back to Firefox. I use startpage and DuckDuckGo. I switched my phone to CyanogenMod. I send everything through a VPN. I have Thunderbird, instant messaging apps go through Tor, basically anything that is asynchronous (although I don't use Tor for everday browsing -- it's just too painful). I use TextSecure for SMS. Basically the same user exerience, but I feel better. I'm using Dropbox for now, but looking for alternatives. I wish there was a better alternative to email.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    I'm using Dropbox for now, but looking for alternatives. My wife and I have switched to Bittorrent sync. It's fast and you have the amount of storage that your computers have. We have one very low-power machine that is always on to assure that we can always sync. Folders with important data are backed up using tarsnap.
  - miclill 13y ago
    If you want Dropbox with clientside encryption: https://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology https://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology I use seafile on a raspberry pi: http://www.seafile.com/en/home/ http://www.seafile.com/en/home/
- mark_l_watson 13y ago
  +1 for mentioning medical information. Right now with the Affordable Health Care Act, no penalty for preexisting conditions, but get a republican controlled congress and white house, and that might go away.
zmanian 13y ago
If we as a society tolerate large scale institutions devoted to undermining and exploiting trust, we will all be immensely poorer. Rule of law , robust institutions and trustworthy systems are the basic infrastructure of the economy. It is outrageous that nation states are attacking these foundations for short term advantage.
sschueller 13y ago
What I find scary is the amount of datacenters being built by US companies abroad. For example Equinix is building large datacenter all over Switzerland. Swiss companies are blindly trusting them with their equipment. Equinix controls the keys and access to you racks and cages. They can get to your hardware with ease and surely will when is US government asks no matter what Swiss laws may say. What I also find suspect is the amount of investment banks (never heard of any of them before) in these datacenters with large cages of machines. Are they really investment banks or a cover for machines where the NSA stores data. If they can monitor an entire nation for a month they have to store that data somewhere close when dealing with such huge data volumes.
rdl 13y ago
The main cost for me is that I plan to move myself and company to Berlin, DE rather than Bellevue, WA. Given the vastly better hiring position, great universities, CCC, and overall benefits of being in Europe, this seems to be a negative cost overall. So thanks, NSA.
- blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  I'd be curious to know how your German taxes will compare to the U.S.
  - rdl 13y ago
    (I'll figure out projected and actual costs and blog about this at some point! I selfishly want to get other tech companies to move, too) Early on, pretty much irrelevant -- VAT is the pain (and the cost of flying to the Bay Area frequently, the cost of moving, putting a bunch of my guns in archival storage, extra hassle in fundraising, ...) I'll probably be back in the US or in non-Germany by the time of taking capital gains, so it's really just: 1) Taxes on business profits 2) Personal income taxes (which, since I don't take a large salary, can't be huge; roughly the same German rate vs. SF rate) 3) Social insurance/etc. net of services SF, CA has absurdly high taxes (federal/state/local) PLUS higher effective taxes due to both high prices pushing income brackets up, and things like $2mm shitty condos being effectively a "tax" as well, and shitty services for the money (so you have to purchase private alternatives on top of paying taxes). On #3 -- I am indifferent between spending $500/mo in increased tax vs. $500/mo on healthcare. For people with school or college aged children, education benefits in Europe seem to be worth a huge amount. There are intangibles like not having to walk over homeless people to get into your office in the morning, or piles of human feces on the sidewalk during the mid-afternoon. Being able to hire awesome people (competing with Rocket, Soundcloud, and a bunch of 1-2 person startups, rather than with ~every startup in SV), and not having to put up with US immigration hassle for a non-US cofounder, makes up for a lot of it. "Branding" advantages of being a European company make up for the rest.
    - blisterpeanuts 13y ago
Fasebook 13y ago
Thanks for the news NYTimes
bsder 13y ago
The solution to this isn't "different datacenters". It's to go back to the original end-to-end internet so I can run my servers on my premises. That won't stop the NSA from targeting me specifically. But it makes the whole dragnet thing a lot harder when the data is coming from a million physically distributed sources instead of 1,000 sources in one datacenter.
vegustui 13y ago
US tech is dead in China.
TheSmoke 13y ago
OT: is it allowed to post news / articles which require signing up? i'm in turkey right now and every time i click for a nytimes link, i see this: http://imgur.com/e8VVI9v http://imgur.com/e8VVI9v
sehugg 13y ago
Not a lot here about China. One can only speculate whether they've been on top of our surveillance efforts all along, and how much of the Golden Shield project is about defense rather than censorship.
mariuolo 13y ago
>IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government. Wouldn't IBM still be required to grant access even if the data is physically located overseas?

244 points by cottonseed 13y ago

ddlatham 13y ago

It's not the revelations that are costing the tech companies. It's the spying.

gatehouse 13y ago
Yeah, by the same logic, the NYT causes anguish by reporting on tragedies and disasters. EDIT: ALSO: > Despite the tech companies’ assertions that they provide information on their customers only when required under law — and not knowingly through a back door — the perception that they enabled the spying program has lingered Nobody cares if data leaks are intentional or legal. When China was suspected of backdooring routers in 2012 I don't recall anyone caring if it was intentional by the Chinese Tech Companies, or the legality of it if it was intentional. The Congress issued a report saying : Chinese telecommunications companies provide an opportunity for the Chinese government to tamper with the United States telecommunications supply chain. That said, understanding the level and means of state influence and control of economic entities in China remains difficult. As Chinese analysts explain, state control or influence of purportedly private-sector entities in China is neither clear nor disclosed.34 The Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, experts explain, can exert influence over the corporate boards and management of private sector companies, either formally through personnel choices, or in more subtle ways.35 As ZTE’s submission to the Committee states, “the degree of possible government influence must vary across a spectrum.”36 [...] Recommendation 2: Private-sector entities in the United States are strongly encouraged to consider the long-term security risks associated with doing business with either ZTE or Huawei for equipment or services. U.S. network providers and systems developers are strongly encouraged to seek other vendors for their projects. http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/Huawei-ZTE%20Investigative%20Report%20%28FINAL%29.pdf http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/f...
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  > Yeah, by the same logic, the NYT causes anguish by reporting on tragedies and disasters. In some way it does. The side effect of all this reporting is population getting increasingly and predictably more stupid (availability heuristic, for starters) AND stressed at the same time.
  - smtddr 13y ago
    I'll take this one step further. Television news, at least mainstream TVnews in USA, is a totally stress/fear inducer purposely delivered in the most dramatic and usually shallow way possible, so you stick around for the commercials and at the same time the elists influence the viewers' political decisions. Almost everyone would be better off without it as it exists today.
pekk 13y ago
The charges would be equally effective if they were untrue. A lot of things HN has claimed about NSA really can't be substantiated, and that DOESN'T mean that I have to believe the HN position by default.

ihsw 13y ago

> [IBM] is spending $1.2 billion to build cloud computing centers around the world to lure foreign customers who are sensitive about the location of their data. IBM et al are still American companies, and until they're immune to American legislation (ie: FISA Section 702) then no-one will touch them with a fifty-foot ethernet cable. The location of the data is irrelevant. The US Government will not budge on this issue, and they will happily throw the entire tech industry under the bus. Bailing out Silicon Valley and nationalizing as much as possible is very appealing, too.

techtalsky 13y ago
I'm a little surprised this wasn't emphasized in the article. It doesn't matter where the equipment is: the us government can still secretly force you to backdoor it and lie to your customers and the press about it.
- yulaow 13y ago
  For that there is the solution to create a company branch legally indipendent from the main one, so all the assets linked to it would be under the legislation of the state in which they are
  - bsder 13y ago
    Do you really think that IBM would jeopardize its enormous contracts with the US federal government because some subsidiary won't/can't get at data? You have a lot to learn.
    - oijaf888 13y ago
      Are IBM's US government contracts larger than all their foreign business?
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Didn't they lose the CIA's cloud computing contract to Amazon? How much international business are you willing to lose for the harsh US government mistress?

dmix 13y ago

I'm happy NYTimes changed the headline. It used to say "Edward Snowden Leaks Cost US Tech Companies Millions" Now they properly changed it to NSA spying as the cause.

ihsw 13y ago
Read the title more closely -- the revelations are costing tech companies, not the spying itself.

noir_lord 13y ago

Good, if you engaged in the spying you deserve to be hurt. If you didn't then that is unfortunate but hopefully they'll apply pressure to those that did.

minimax 13y ago

The Forrester note† that the article links to is a little more balanced that the NYT article. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, here are some good quotes: It's naive and dangerous to think that the NSA's actions are unique. Nearly every developed nation on the planet has a similar intelligence arm which isn't as forthcoming about its procedures for requesting and gaining access to service provider (and ultimately corporate) data. As stated in the ITIF report, German intelligence has the G10 act which let's them monitor telecommunications traffic without a court order. The fact of the matter is that the IT services market is a part of our portfolios because it provides capabilities we value either against IT or business metrics. And it's highly likely these values are worth more to you than the potential risk you think your company faces due to government surveillance. And if your company is a prime target for government surveillance, you are probably being watched from within your own firewalls right now. ... you can take actions yourself to protect your data from prying eyes when using these services. A quick tip: bring your own encryption. If you hold the keys the governments can't get to your data by going through your service provider. †http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of_prism_will_be_larger_than_itif_projects http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of...

buro9 13y ago
For me, it's not about shifting data out of naivety that companies/users aren't being spied on everywhere. Instead it's about shifting data into a legal domain in which you hope to hold someone to account for intrusive spying. A non-US entity has zero chance of ever holding the government and agencies of the USA to account. And we're also aware that US companies can be forced by the US government or agencies to access data held (by them) overseas. But we do have some chance (fractionally above zero, I'm not deluding myself) of holding our own governments and companies within our legal domain to account. None of it is a substitute to encryption, but this isn't solved through tech alone.
- dreamfactory2 13y ago
  It's not as if government spying prevents anyone else from doing it. And in any case, 'because it's happening anyway' is a terrible argument, you could just as well say that about any crime you care to mention.

arca_vorago 13y ago

The issue of foreseeable consequences is one of the main points I have a problem with. The public was sold war and surveillance to "protect" them, but lets face the realpolitik, it was about "National Interests" and not "National Security", which the totalitarian oligarchy like to conflate as the same. They aren't, but even if they were, they had to have had at least a few analysts in a dark room somewhere who figured this out and sent some reports up the chain. (of course they probably got fired or sent to the mail room...) They knew this was a possibility, that by turning on and growing the surveillance state and trying to kill privacy that it would increase the possibility that the programs would become public, and therefore undermine American credibility as a safe haven. I would present to you that, while they will claim they were unaware of this potential, the reality is that they knew it, and accepted it, because what has been happening is a power play in a currently fairly quiet but still major shift in global power. I've argued with my intel friends that they are off chasing bad guys OCONUS when the real bad guys are in DC, NY, and London, but now those same entities have a stranglehold on the intel agencies themselves (I mean, they always did, the original CIA guys were all Wall Street old boys in the first place, but now it's much worse in my opinion.) Do we really think Hayden is the brain behind these moves? Or Hanlon's razor? No. The surveillance issue is a symptom of a much larger issue at hand, and until we take the discourse to that level there will be very little progress made. All three branches and the fourth estate are corrupted, which undermines our entire already weakened constitutional framework. Now, the realpolitik they don't discuss with the public is that in the new globalized world of supranational entities the concept of national sovereignty is a lost cause. My problem is that they made the decision to adopt this constitution undermining policy without even having a public debate about it. The oligarchy have said, in essence: "The proletariat serfs are too dumb (from all the propaganda) to make informed decisions about their democracy, therefore, we shall placate them with gladiatorial political shows while we pull the strings from the shadows."

cryoshon 13y ago
The proliteriat are dumb because they're constantly stuffed with propaganda tailored to their low intelligence because it's assumed the proliteriat is dumb. It's circular reasoning used to rationalize the unbalanced locus of power.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

whyme 13y ago

How is it that IBM would gain business? They are still an American company which makes them equally susceptible to this form of data theft. I can't see handing my data over to IBM any more than I would Facebook or Amazon. Surely the article could have picked a better example.

Zigurd 13y ago
IBM could make their products verifiably secure. Open source client software. Web of trust. Making encryption the default. Any non-US competitor would have to do at least as much because NSA surveillance recognizes no borders. Against tier-1 state actors, everyone is on a level playing field. The question is, which nation's tech industry will be the first to decide that the only way to win is to not play the game?
ForHackernews 13y ago
In many cases, IBM will sell you hardware and software. They will help you install and set it up, but at the end of the process you own your data. It's not on some 'cloud' controlled by IBM, it's on a rack of IBM-branded servers in your own datacenter or server closet. The software is almost invariably some version of Linux, so you can audit it for security. Your question is like asking, "How can I trust that Western Digital won't turn over the data on my hard drive they sold me?" I suppose it's possible future revelations will show that all major software and hardware packages supported by US firms contain legally-mandated secret backdoors, but we're not that far down the rabbit hole yet.
- whyme 13y ago
  I've done business with IBM at a corporate level and I assure you that's not what's happening here. It's the clients whom are buying services from IBM saying "whoa, I'm using your services, but I don't want our data falling into the US govt's hands", that they are addressing. IBM is appeasing these clients by telling them they'll locate their data elsewhere, yet there's quite a bit of data attached to and flowing into those services.
  - 13y ago

higherpurpose 13y ago

Finally, some good news!

cottonseed 13y ago
I have to agree. I'm very pessimistic about this whole situation, and this is one of the few forces I can see that could have some positive impact.

jobu 13y ago

"Even as Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowden’s leaks ..." That statement is a perfect example of the real problem with the US government and many journalists. They don't see the actual spying as the cause of all the backlash - it's all Snowden's fault for telling the world.

roc 13y ago
Political journalism in the US has been meta for so long, I don't think they even know the difference anymore.
- ProAm 13y ago
  Politics and Journalism have always been a little 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'. They both need each other to exist, and yet feign like they can't stand each other at the same time.
  - illumen 13y ago
    Or with Murdoch it's BIG, not little. For example, after all Murdoch newspapers in Australia (which is most newspapers) went for one political party. That party won the election, and afterwards Murdoch got almost a billion $ tax cut from the government that was elected. Similar tactics are used all over the world, and he switches sides too.
- psbp 13y ago
  It's been like this for a long time. A controversy will feed itself, the actual issues won't as easily be stuck in perpetuity. Even history is taught like this.
  - silentOpen 13y ago
    History is a narrative. Teaching is a narrative. Media is a narrative. Examining the root causes rather than the narrative fabric is rational. Most governmental actors are either intentionally or ignorantly not rational in this respect.

sixothree 13y ago

Personally I've been using fewer Google and other hosted services simply because they make me feel 'icky'. More and more I use startpage for general searches and tor for anything personal like medical information that I don't want in my permanent record.

cottonseed 13y ago
Same here. I'm almost completely off Google products. If you do keep using Google products, make sure you disable location and web tracking. I deleted my Facebook account. I switched back to Firefox. I use startpage and DuckDuckGo. I switched my phone to CyanogenMod. I send everything through a VPN. I have Thunderbird, instant messaging apps go through Tor, basically anything that is asynchronous (although I don't use Tor for everday browsing -- it's just too painful). I use TextSecure for SMS. Basically the same user exerience, but I feel better. I'm using Dropbox for now, but looking for alternatives. I wish there was a better alternative to email.
- danieldk 13y ago
  I'm using Dropbox for now, but looking for alternatives. My wife and I have switched to Bittorrent sync. It's fast and you have the amount of storage that your computers have. We have one very low-power machine that is always on to assure that we can always sync. Folders with important data are backed up using tarsnap.
- miclill 13y ago
  If you want Dropbox with clientside encryption: https://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology https://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology I use seafile on a raspberry pi: http://www.seafile.com/en/home/ http://www.seafile.com/en/home/
mark_l_watson 13y ago
+1 for mentioning medical information. Right now with the Affordable Health Care Act, no penalty for preexisting conditions, but get a republican controlled congress and white house, and that might go away.

zmanian 13y ago

If we as a society tolerate large scale institutions devoted to undermining and exploiting trust, we will all be immensely poorer. Rule of law , robust institutions and trustworthy systems are the basic infrastructure of the economy. It is outrageous that nation states are attacking these foundations for short term advantage.

sschueller 13y ago

What I find scary is the amount of datacenters being built by US companies abroad. For example Equinix is building large datacenter all over Switzerland. Swiss companies are blindly trusting them with their equipment. Equinix controls the keys and access to you racks and cages. They can get to your hardware with ease and surely will when is US government asks no matter what Swiss laws may say. What I also find suspect is the amount of investment banks (never heard of any of them before) in these datacenters with large cages of machines. Are they really investment banks or a cover for machines where the NSA stores data. If they can monitor an entire nation for a month they have to store that data somewhere close when dealing with such huge data volumes.

rdl 13y ago

The main cost for me is that I plan to move myself and company to Berlin, DE rather than Bellevue, WA. Given the vastly better hiring position, great universities, CCC, and overall benefits of being in Europe, this seems to be a negative cost overall. So thanks, NSA.

blisterpeanuts 13y ago
I'd be curious to know how your German taxes will compare to the U.S.
- rdl 13y ago
  (I'll figure out projected and actual costs and blog about this at some point! I selfishly want to get other tech companies to move, too) Early on, pretty much irrelevant -- VAT is the pain (and the cost of flying to the Bay Area frequently, the cost of moving, putting a bunch of my guns in archival storage, extra hassle in fundraising, ...) I'll probably be back in the US or in non-Germany by the time of taking capital gains, so it's really just: 1) Taxes on business profits 2) Personal income taxes (which, since I don't take a large salary, can't be huge; roughly the same German rate vs. SF rate) 3) Social insurance/etc. net of services SF, CA has absurdly high taxes (federal/state/local) PLUS higher effective taxes due to both high prices pushing income brackets up, and things like $2mm shitty condos being effectively a "tax" as well, and shitty services for the money (so you have to purchase private alternatives on top of paying taxes). On #3 -- I am indifferent between spending $500/mo in increased tax vs. $500/mo on healthcare. For people with school or college aged children, education benefits in Europe seem to be worth a huge amount. There are intangibles like not having to walk over homeless people to get into your office in the morning, or piles of human feces on the sidewalk during the mid-afternoon. Being able to hire awesome people (competing with Rocket, Soundcloud, and a bunch of 1-2 person startups, rather than with ~every startup in SV), and not having to put up with US immigration hassle for a non-US cofounder, makes up for a lot of it. "Branding" advantages of being a European company make up for the rest.
  - blisterpeanuts 13y ago

Fasebook 13y ago

Thanks for the news NYTimes

bsder 13y ago

The solution to this isn't "different datacenters". It's to go back to the original end-to-end internet so I can run my servers on my premises. That won't stop the NSA from targeting me specifically. But it makes the whole dragnet thing a lot harder when the data is coming from a million physically distributed sources instead of 1,000 sources in one datacenter.

vegustui 13y ago

US tech is dead in China.

TheSmoke 13y ago

OT: is it allowed to post news / articles which require signing up? i'm in turkey right now and every time i click for a nytimes link, i see this: http://imgur.com/e8VVI9v http://imgur.com/e8VVI9v

sehugg 13y ago

Not a lot here about China. One can only speculate whether they've been on top of our surveillance efforts all along, and how much of the Golden Shield project is about defense rather than censorship.

mariuolo 13y ago

>IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government. Wouldn't IBM still be required to grant access even if the data is physically located overseas?