Slashdot Mirror
How the NSA Is Harming America's Economy
anagama writes "According to an article at Medium, 'Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. ... Cisco saw orders in Brazil drop 25% and Russia drop 30%. ... Analysts had expected Cisco's business in emerging markets to increase 6%, but instead it dropped 12%, sending shares of Cisco plunging 10% in after-hours trading.' This is in addition to the harm caused to remote services that may cost $35 billion over the next three years. Then, of course, there are the ways the NSA has made ID theft easier. ID theft cost Americans $1.52 billion in 2011, to say nothing of the time wasted in solving ID theft issues — some of that figure is certainly attributable to holes the NSA helped build. The NSA, its policies, and the politicians who support the same are directly responsible for massive losses of money and jobs."
#include "grumpycat"
printf("good!\n");
seriously, I would not trust US hardware and software, either.
but then again, those routers are already at every choke-point on the internet. the US owns the internet (public one, anyway) in all practical ways.
but for private networks when you can pick which routers and switches you want to deploy, picking a US based vendor would not be wise. I would not do it if I was in charge of a private network.
maybe its time we consider going back to software (oss) based networking gear. it will be much slower than hardware based ones but we can't verify hardware designs like we can software ones.
there is also no way to put this genie back into the bottle. once your cred is gone, its gone. and the US has lost ALL cred when it comes to safeguarding your privacy.
sad but true. as a US citizen, I am sorry for how badly we have botched the world's trust.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Let Brasil and Russia buy Chinese then. They deserve only the best.
From one perspective some of us do care - they do make stuff that works reasonably well.
But my suspicion is that there's more to this than just abandoning Cisco. In many cases it's a lot cheaper to set up a router based on a PC and Linux, which probably is what happens in "emerging markets".
As for the NSA - they could probably do a lot better for the economy if they did put their effort into tracking down and nuking scammers, spammers and other internet pests - and their karma would be better. And they better use the CIA and others to really "take care" of those problems.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
As soon as software catches up and makes it practical, the rest of the world is going to dump the US cloud forever.
How much taxes is Cisco paying to the US government? Because if they pay like every other corporation (1%), then the fact that they now sell less won't have any repercussion on the tax income.
I still hate NSA, but this looks like two ass-holes pointing fingers at each other.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Harming America's economy? This is more about affecting Cisco's profits. And color me unsympathetic, as they are an "American" corporation (in scare quotes since it shifts as it suits them) when it comes time to complain about something, but they are apparently Swiss http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-28/biggest-tax-avoiders-win-most-gaming-1-trillion-u-s-tax-break.html when its time to pay taxes.
Look beyond hardware -- think data centers, cloud services, etc. Europeans are dropping American-based offerings for European-based ones or moving it back inhouse.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If the American security infrastructure is going to turn American corporations into de-facto arms of the intelligence process, then nobody has any choice but to not trust them.
Anything involved in the security of the internet that's been tainted by being complicit with the NSA et al can't be trusted. So Cisco is going to feel the pinch.
Anything in 'the cloud' ran by a US company is subject to PATRIOT Act demands. So Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon ... they're all going to feel the pinch. And Google's hosted solutions for email is also something you can't trust.
When the NSA undermines security for their own ends, then anything they've had a hand in can't be trusted.
So the end result is most governments and companies in other countries more or less have to look at any US player as not trustworthy, or actively hostile to your goals.
As long as you keep acting like your security trumps the sovereignty of everyone else ... well, the only answer is to say "OK, fuck you" and cut you out of the picture entirely.
All of your big corporations are more or less presumed to be lying (because they can't admit to participating in this), complicit with collecting data to send back to Big Brother, and violating local privacy and data access laws.
And since 'Murica has been railing about how the Chinese are infiltrating their stuff (while doing the same thing), and complaining about countries which restrict a free internet ... they've lost a position of having the moral high ground. The US is doing everything they accuse other countries of doing, only they're apparently doing it on a massive scale.
So, yes, this should have an impact on the US economy. And you can choose to stay the course and see it keep happening, or you can fix the problem. And so far, we've seen no evidence whatsoever there's any contrition or accepting that what they did was going to piss off everyone else.
But when all of those orders start getting cancelled, and new ones stop coming, don't stand around wailing about how unfair it is that people have decided they can't trust you and don't want your stuff.
But in a country which is actively ignoring its own Constitution and freedoms, I'm not expecting any meaningful introspection on behalf of the US. I'm expecting more bluster, claims about how everyone else is doing it, and continuing with the status quo.
I feel really bad for Cisco. They went out of their way to build all those back doors into all of their equipment for the NSA, and now people don't want to buy their products. Does that seem fair?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
When SOPA was a looming thing, I was in the market to move from shared hosting to a VPS, and so I made it a point to chose a VPS that was in another country.
Sadly, I chose the Netherlands, who are NSA collaborators. I'm just waiting for a specific piece of software to be released, and I'm out of there and on to a new server in a new country - I'm thinking Switzerland right now. Iceland is too expensive.
SHOW ME THE PROOF
I would, but look what happened to the last brave American who tried that. I don't want to have to seek asylum in Russia and ask some crime ridden South American country to take me in, nor watch my back every minute for the U.S. agents trying to kidnap or kill me. The President talked big about protecting whistle blowers before this happened, but then all of that was quietly removed from his website Everyone of us that actually has the proof knows better than show it to you.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I don't know who is interested in cisco, but you missed the big picture.
Not really. Having demonstrated that American firms can't be trusted (because due to the PATRIOT Act they can't), American firms will see declines in sales from outside of America.
If American firms see declines in sales, they lay off people. So you get the double whammy of companies making less money, and having fewer people on the payroll.
All those consultants who might be engaged to do something, well, now they're persona-non-grata because they too can't be trusted since they could be compelled to hand over your business information.
All of those cloud based services and the like, well, people can't trust them either.
For a country which has staked its future in IP and a knowledge economy ... making your vendors into someone that can't be trusted means that all of a sudden those things which were supposed to save the economy are now floundering.
And America keeps acting like it's their right to violate local laws and generally act like douchebags. All while acting like if someone else did this it would be an act of war.
So, it's not melodramatic. It's real, and entirely deserved, and a product of your own creation.
You could make the argument that this is overblown, but you cannot deny that it is true at least to some significant degree. The ironic part is how the U.S. government has been warning us about the coming cyber-apocalypse, and it turns out that they have done more to stoke those flames than anybody else.
Router based on PCs were there since last century, it wouldn't change projections beause they were always there. But putting an equipment that you can't trust in the critical point of your network where you must have the maximum trust (either because Cisco want to cooperate, or is forced to, secret laws are nukes in the trust domain) is not a great idea.
We have found that we cannot trust the networks of ISPs anymore: there can be an NSA tap anywhere. A good and practical move would be to start using more and more robust end-to-end encryption. Things like SSL are possibly out of question as NSA has corrupted the root certs.
But even if you pop the champagne and throw a party when Cisco is hurt, I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.
These leaks have cost America the trust of an entire generation. In the last few months I deleted my gmail, linkedin, facebook, twitter, ebay and amazon accounts, and when my cellphone dies I won't buy another. If US companies deny their customers the basic human right that is dignity through privacy then it will be to their extreme financial loss. Personally I want no part of what these services have to offer because they do not respect me as a individual. I don't trust the hardware, the software, the services, the network, the companies or the government. And google can stick glass up their ass.
A bit hard to prove a case of it but not too hard to show the possability. Google around for the documented cases in Greece and (IIRC Italy) where organized crime used U.S. mandated back doors into telephone switches to spy on their government.
> So the particular statement referring to the NSA making identity theft easier is flat out BULLSHIT.
How so? I thought it is pretty much fact. They introduced some weak encryption, and most of all they introduced weak random number generators, which means any key generated using it should be considered compromised. If the NSA can break it, the hackers will learn how to break it, too, especially if there is money behind it.
Emerging markets ... likely need enterprise class equipment too.
Well, yes and no, but reportedly 98.9% no in the case of at least one huge deal that fell through.
SDN is coming, and the likes of Cisco are terrified of it. So would you be if your own executives thought it was going to cut your company's value in half and there was little you could do about it.
The main thing they've got left to compete with is the trust in their brand, the idea that they're a safe bet and no-one ever got fired for buying Cisco. They're in trouble even without all the NSA publicity, but if their own government is damaging their established brand, it doesn't exactly help their situation.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Not just the NSA, but the TSA aswell. Myself and many other Canadians that I know refuse to vacation in the States anymore because of the invasive border checks.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all go bankrupt at once because of this.
That is extremely unlikely. What is more plausible, however, is:
1. They continue to lose the confidence of international customers.
2. Those customers seek alternative arrangements that they consider more trustworthy, possibly ad-hoc ones at first.
3. Over time, a new generation of more structured alternatives begins to develop to supply the new market demand, offering similar services and products to the big name US brands.
Some of these may be direct commercial competitors, but that's not really the concern for the current market leaders, because the barrier to entry for anyone trying to compete head-on is huge. Probably the greater risk is collaborative movements, whether Open Source tools or simply a degree of standardisation and compatibility between smaller vendors that means you can build (for example) a heterogenous network using a pool of specialist vendors and have a good chance of it working.
This is potentially toxic to broad US vendors such as Cisco in the networking space or the big cloud services companies who ideally want you to outsource almost your entire IT infrastructure to them alone. Which brings us on to...
4. Even in the US, long-time and lucrative customers start second-guessing whether they still need US IT Brand X, and those brands start losing serious money to both the foreign movements and, over time, also to new competitors in the US who are riding the open/collaboration wave to get a disruptive foothold in the market.
And at that point, the big US vendors are really in trouble.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
SHOW ME THE PROOF
Ok...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130909/11430124454/john-gilmore-how-nsa-sabotaged-key-security-standard.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?hp&_r=0
I think you're just failing to understand the scope of what they've done. The NSA planted people in standards bodies to deliberately weaken those standards. Not only do we have eye whiteness's from those standards committees that have complained about this for years, but we've got leaked documents from the NSA bragging about doing it. One of their primary goals seems to have been to dissuade broadening the use of encryption in general. By making the standards complicated, hard to understand, a lot of people just gave up and didn't implement them. In other cases they tried to block standards from using encryption by default. All of this leads to a less secure network. Without a doubt those actions of made crime and identity theft much easier. Can we find some guy and say that his identity was stolen because of the NSA? No... but what we can say is that without the NSA's interference, there would be more, and better encryption... and more and better encryption would have definitely reduced the numbers of identity thefts in the world.
The problem with using "a PC and Linux" as a router is even if you are picky about the hardware its still gonna suck several times the amount of power a piece of dedicated hardware would and in most emerging markets power is anything but cheap. Now sure if the router is gonna be doing other jobs, such as the AMD Bobcat I set up that was a combo router/media server? it might make sense but you go with the traditional "just use this no longer useful P4 PC" route you'll be blowing through the juice.
As for the NSA...who cares about the hardware? Any company that gives 2 shits about privacy is gonna avoid the USA like an STD and the NSA also put the brakes on the whole "just use the cloud!" bullshit as we now know anything you put into a USA based cloud becomes the NSA's to snoop as they like. I'm sure the amount of money all this business avoiding the USA is just insane but sadly getting an exact dollar figure would be next to impossible.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
HAHAHAHAHA Yes this is so perfect! It just keeps getting better and better!" - Bin Laden's ghost
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel