Comment by greendata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greendata | Hacker News Reader

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It's not just going to be hosting providers that are affected by this. It's going to lawyers, software engineers, sys admins, writers and graphic designers who are going to lose work/business from SAAS companies. Software is one of the few areas where the US economy is growing somewhat sustainably (as opposed to banking/gambling/housing speculation/medical expenses for elderly). The NSA and all those NSA contractors are taking money out of our hands and destroying our professions. We should be fighting this tooth and nail.

- Politically, we should punish anything associated with the NSA.

- Socially, we should shun everyone from this date forward who works directly with or as a contractor for anything associated with NSA/FBI/CIA/DEA/DIA. We should not hire any programmer who, from this date point forward, has worked in those capacities. They are destroying our profession and businesses.

- On the engineering front, we should be designing technologies for evading the NSA et al, and spread those technologies. We need to do everything possible to make them easy to use and make them widespread.

- Any person or company who stands up to these organizations should be lionized and we should try to patronize their businesses or employee them. Especially if the suffer consequences like jail and torture.

- Facebook, Google, especially Palantir are known collaborators and we should treat them as such

The nails are already in the coffin for US internet behemoths. Any non-NSA cooperating country has strong interests in keeping their search engines, social networks, and cloud software internal to their country.

Google, Microsoft, and Facebook basically have had billions of dollars shaved off of their future market capitalization -- though I have not seen anyone say this yet.

For everyone abroad who is technically adept and talented, the vaults of wealth have been unlocked for you; just copy the successful offerings of American companies. Don't worry about software patents or trademarks unless your country is complicit, you'll have the autonomy of a oligarch (said with some sarcasm.)

There is one solution here: open source, distributed software. If you want to build a company to promote real security this is your only option.

Agreed. The nails are in for the current system, but that is not The System, just one of many potential ones.

If you are non-US citizen and your customers request a product similar to US product please do exactly as AJ007 says. It will help you, the world, and the US long term. I say this as US citizen and SW dev. Please take our jobs and customers! We don't deserve those customers if we can't protect them and their data.

However, you should only build it if customers are requesting SAAS (or other offerings). Be very careful about blindly copying US business b/c many are successful simply b/c they are almost "Apparatchik" entities, supplying and protected by the US Gov. For example, if you copy Palantir or even Google/Facebook you may not succeed b/c you won't have customers in the same way the US does. But overall, this is a great opportunity for devs from Switzerland (and the like) to get some new customers.

Caveat: If you are planning to follow the above advice, and you think your country will not enforce the wishes of the US government on such matters, check that assumption carefully before you bet your fortune and your life on it.

Thus the caveat I added in the original comment: unless your country is complicit.

Simply not true. There aren't enough people who care. Maybe 1% care. Everyone is going to keep using windows, facebook, and google. There are no nails in any coffin for any of these companies.

It is a major national security issue to any country to have foreign countries spying on them. The only controversy in the US is that the NSA is spying on American citizens in America. Any and all communication by foreigners at home and abroad is fair game. There is a reason why Google & Facebook are not market leaders in either China & Russia -- vkontakte, baidu, yandex, etc.

Likewise, this is also very bad news if you are a Chinese or Russian internet company and expect to become a dominant player in the US consumer web/digital/mobile market place.

I guess the obvious question to this post is:

What are you doing on your own checklist? Those are some pretty extremist notions.

If part of your hiring criteria was to exclude anyone who had worked for a contractor or directly for a government organization, I doubt many people would want to work for you. Not because they had violated your criteria, either.

Generally, I won't be hiring them, in hiring interviews I'd recommend against them for ethical reasons, and I'll avoid doing work for them if possible.

I'm referring to a very small percentage of the government and contract workers who are involved in security and surveillance. I'm not talking about VA or even the regular marines/navy/police.

I won't be doing this explicitly.

Whether people would want to to work in a place that explicitly will not work with former NSA contractors depends on the area. In SF, Boston, NYC, Portland, maybe LA it would probably help you hire good workers. Obviously, in DC or Houston it would be more controversial and hurt the company. Remember these organizations/contractors are destroying our jobs, especially in silicon valley.

The safeguards for foreigners are much less than those for US citizens. For example, the NSA doesn't need to go through FISA court to spy on non-citizens. So if you store your data on a non-US server, you're probably just making it easier for them to get to it, not harder.

Not to mention, most countries will pretty much cooperate with the US when it comes to intelligence. The only ones that might not are countries like Russia or China that have their own military-industrial complexes, which are just as eager to get at your data and a lot less scrupulous about using it.

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