Why The NSA Prism Program Could Kill U.S. Tech Companies -- Popular Mechanics
Spying on foreigners could create a terrible blowback to the U.S. economy. Has it really come to this?
Within 24 hours, the leak of two documents has revealed a vast network of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance operations that were authorized by FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts with the oversight of the U.S. Congress. The first document, which Popular Mechanics detailed yesterday, was a FISA court order demanding all telephony metadata from Verizon Business Network Services over a three-month period, though it hinted at a much broader program of call log data mining. The second document referred to a different—and apparently much larger—program aimed at real-time analysis of web traffic from nine large technology firms, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and ("coming soon") Dropbox. Details are still murky, but it's clear that this was not some clandestine sniffing effort—it was done with the full cooperation of the companies involved (though many of the companies have denied that this represents an automatic backdoor into their servers).
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My Comment: There is a lot of truth to this Popular Mechanics article. In my spare time I do this blog .... in my professional/work life I do other things, and one of them is being a participant in web projects and web start-ups. Last year we did a survey of teenage web users (in Canada) and what struck me was that their number one concern when they were on the web was their privacy .... in short .... if they felt that their privacy was being violated, they would simply go elsewhere. The NSA Prism program is already raising a chill on social media ..... and knowing how quick social media can send a message .... the tech companies are getting justifiably worried. Customers use their services because of reliability and also because they trust them .... lose this you will lose your clients. But as bad as this .... and it is .... what is raising concerns in the tech world is how will this impact 'Cloud'. The tech giants are banking on this as the next big thing .... but if they cannot guarantee one's security and privacy .... who will want to use it.