U.S. Experts: NSA Damages Economy and Internet Security

U.S. Experts: NSA Damages Economy and Internet Security

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24997658_m featureThe U.S. National Security Agency’s (#NSA) actions have and will continue to cause “significant damage” to U.S. interests and the global Internet community, the New America Foundation suggests in a new report released Tuesday morning.

The report details how the NSA has been using a variety of programs and methods to collect metadata on Internet users and engage in a massive #surveillance effort that impacts the global Internet community. In the report, the authors move past the debate over tradeoffs between national security and individual privacy to focus on the overall costs and benefits of the NSA’s programs on the U.S. economy, American foreign policy, and the security of the Internet as a whole.

According to Security Management since leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published about the NSA’s activities, trust in American businesses has decreased. Those facing the “most acute economic fallout” are cloud computing and webhosting services as “nearly 50 percent of the worldwide cloud computing revenue comes from the United States,” the report said. Just weeks after Snowden’s leaks were reported, cloud computing companies—like Dropbox and Amazon—announced they were losing business to foreign competitors.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

Additional calculations predict that the cloud computing industry will suffer anywhere from a $22 to $180 billion loss over the next three years because of the NSA’s PRISM program. These losses may already be playing out as a survey of 1,000 global information and communications technology (ICT) decision-makers found that the #NSA disclosures “have had a direct impact on how companies around the world think about ICT and cloud computing in particular.”