How the NSA scandal hurts the economy

For what it's worth - I've got clients and colleagues asking hard questions about data jurisdiction and data sovereignty in the last 6 weeks. The old "obvious answers" to cloud storage and computing are no longer considered quite so straightforward. Can an Australian company be considered to be doing "due diligence" if storing customer data on Amazon's cloud? Or Azure? Or AppEngine/Heroku/Rackspace/Force.com? I've even got clients asking if there are MessageLabs equivalents that're solely under Australian law instead of US law?

Personally, I don't trust the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to be any less morally corrupt that the NSA - though I hold some small comfort from the fact that they're significantly less well funded and almost certainly don't have the small country sized staff of Math PhDs that the NSA have…

Even though I don't assume we (here in Australia) have any better protection against government snooping - everyone I talk to seems to understand that acknowledging and accepting the risk of local government snooping is something easily explained to customers/shareholders/judges than having to explain why you stored confidential information on cloud services that you knew were under foreign surveillance.

My response has been to (bring forward the implementation of) "encrypt all the things". I suspect this is already costing US businesses - I wonder if Dropbox/GDrive/SkyDrive are noticing reduced de-dupe rates? I'm now using encfs for most of the free storage they're giving me.

I tried this argument (hurting USA's economy) as an argument to several friends on how harmfull the NSA sweep everything up surveillance will probably hurt our economy. They don't buy my argument because the US news media tells one side of the story only (mostly). It only takes a few seconds to find relevant foreign news stories, but there seems to be a hysterical blindness happening.

I enjoy playing Chess and Go, and it is very important to accept what is on the board as reality, and play the game accordingly.

I listened to Richard Stallman earlier today, saying that now is the time when perhaps the fight for freedom could work. I think Richard is perhaps overly optimistic, but we can hope. I have increased donations to EFF, FSF, and the ACLU - that seems the best I can do. I used to write frequently to my elected representatives but most of them seem to have their own agendas that are not aligned with what I think are public interests.

I've said this before, but I'll repeat it here. There is zero chance that anybody will believe what the US government / US companies will say from now on. Their credibility has been fatally damaged, for years to come.

The fact that we are not yet seeing any exodus from the current cloud offerings is because there are no easy-to-use alternatives which, at the same time, offer a better degree of trust. But I am confident they will emerge, since a huge market for these kind of services has opened up - before the Snowden relevations we were just suspicious, now we are certain.

And an important selling point of these services will be to not be US-based, and better yet, not run by any american company. Trust can not be regained, and whatever will be said won't be believed: so you say that you are not spying on me? Yeah, sure! So you say you have no backdoors? Yeah, sure! So you say you can guarantee under oath that you will not spy on me, under any circumstances, and you can prove this with court documents, contracts, laws passed by the US congress, and the clear and concise statements of the US president and the CIA boss? Yeah, sure!

It's sad that this is our best chance for changing US policy at this point, but I'll take it. I would have hoped that the ideals of freedom were something that the American people embraced for their own sake, but you play the hand you're dealt.