[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] Why The Tech Industry Should Be Furious About NSA's Over Surveillance

[michael gurstein]

-----Original Message-----
From: dewayne-net at warpspeed.com [mailto:dewayne-net at warpspeed.com] On Behalf
Of Dewayne Hendricks
Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2013 6:57 AM
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why The Tech Industry Should Be Furious About NSA's
Over Surveillance

Why The Tech Industry Should Be Furious About NSA's Over Surveillance from
the it'll-hit-their-bottom-lines dept By Mike Masnick June 14 2013
<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130614/12173323472/why-tech-industry-sho
uld-be-furious-about-nsas-over-surveillance.shtml>

We've already pointed out how some tech companies, including Yahoo!, Google
and Twitter havefought back against overly intrusive attempts at government
surveillance (though, they often lose), and there's been some discussion
about how these companies are fighting to protect their users' privacy.
There's a further reason why all of the tech industry should be speaking out
against NSA surveillance. Beyond just being the right thing to do to protect
your users' privacy, it's likely that it also improves their bottom line.
We're already starting to see the fallout from the revelations of the NSA
being able to scoop up data from various tech companies, and it's going to
be harmful to their revenue. 

Right after the initial NSA leaks came out, David Kirkpatrick quickly wrote
about how the Obama administration appeared to be sacrificing the US
internet industry in a weak attempt at trying to increase security (despite
no evidence that it's actually done that). The global implications of the
NSA spying aren't hard to figure out -- especially when looking at how many
people around the globe use these services:

It's quite possible that Obama has undermined the effectiveness and
attractiveness for political speech and protest of what have been the most
potent communications tools for activism in history. Political and
commercial opponents of the U.S. in every country as well as governments
themselves will likely alert citizens to the potential that U.S. companies
could pass their info back to US authorities. This will seriously conflict
with these companies' aim to maintain their platforms as neutral global
environments. It could dramatically slow their global growth. 

[....] Do we really want to impair such powerful tools for spreading
dialogue, political discourse, and U.S. values? Is it worthwhile to impair
the extraordinary financial and commercial success of these great flagships
for the American economy? Does Obama want Facebook et al just to be seen as
tools of American power? That is certainly not the way the average user in
Bolivia sees it. They see it as a tool of their own personal power, and they
don't want governments interfering with that.

Further, he points out, this will likely drive users to foreign
corporations, rather than American ones, as they strive to protect their
privacy:

Don't believe there are not alternatives to the U.S. Net collossi. Companies
worldwide are already relentlessly working on alternatives. The second
largest search service worldwide is China's Baidu, with more than 8% of
searches globally at the end of last year according to ComScore. Russia's
Yandex is at close to 3%, more than Microsoft's own search product. In
social networking, China's Tencent has had a stunning recent success with
its WeChat product, which by some counts has over 450 million users
worldwide, including many tens of millions outside China. Most major Chinese
Internet companies have global ambitions.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress>

 


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