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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.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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.
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.
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.