How much damage has Prism done to US tech giants?
...Firms which guarantee client confidentiality – doctors and lawyers, for example – have genuine worries about what could or could not be read. Law firms who regularly end up suing governments are especially worried. New details from the Snowden leaks says that the NSA routinely violates attorney client privilege if "foreign intelligence" is contained within. Even if the NSA doesn't actually end up reading the text of your emails, if you deal with anyone they are watching, you end up on a watch list – which is a recipe for airport harassment all over the world.

Silicon Valley is seen to be too close to the American security services. For example, when Facebook's chief of security left the social media giant, he went straight to work at the NSA. When big tech firms buy up their smaller rivals, they are keen to make deals with the state to improve intelligence access to those services. For example, since Skype was bought by Microsoft, its officials have refused to confirm Skype's original claim that calls can't be tapped, and have updated their privacy policies to demonstrate that they "cooperate with law enforcement as is legally required and technically feasible"....

...This doesn't just worry lawyers and journalists, it worries the tech industry itself, too. Firms like Amazon, Dropbox and Rackspace have bet the farm on secure, easily accessible cloud storage, and now the NSA looks like pulling the rug out from under them. Firms across Europe – like the French state-funded "Sovereign Cloud" – are looking to make a killing, exploiting the fears businesses have. ...