NSA Connection Has Attendees Fleeing Encryption Company's Conference
The National Security Agency continues to wield its commercial kiss of death, causing business to flee from American firms that have, inadvertently or deliberately, been involved in the snooping. Last month, Boeing lost a multi-billion dollar contract with Brazil over the NSA's shenanigans. More billions in European business are at risk for U.S. companies feared as direct conduits to the spies. And now attendees are dropping out of the cybersecurity-oriented RSA Conference after sponsoring company, RSA Security LLC, was revealed to have accepted millions of dollars in return for building a backdoor into its encryption software....
...Other prominent cybersecurity figures have followed suit, seeking to punish the company and, no doubt, wishing to distance themselves from the black hole of ethical choices and commercial opportunities that surrounds the intersection of the NSA with anything. Expressing the sentiments of the cybersecurity community regarding RSA's actions, Carr said, "I can't imagine a worse action, short of a company's CEO getting involved in child porn."...
How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet
...The tech companies quickly issued denials that they had granted the US government direct access to their customers’ data. But that stance was complicated by the fact that they did participate—often unwillingly—in a government program that required them to share data when a secret court ordered them to do so. Google and its counterparts couldn’t talk about all the details, in part because they were legally barred from full disclosure and in part because they didn’t know all the details about how the program actually worked. And so their responses were seen less as full-throated denials than mealy-mouthed contrivances.
They hardly had the time to figure out how to frame their responses to Gellman’s account before President Obama weighed in. While implicitly confirming the program (and condemning the leak), he said, “With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to US citizens and does not apply to people living in the United States.” This may have soothed some members of the public, but it was no help to the tech industry. The majority of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo customers are not citizens of the US. Now those customers, as well as foreign regulatory agencies like those in the European Union, were being led to believe that using US-based services meant giving their data directly to the NSA....
...Not just revenue was at stake. So were ideals that have sustained the tech world since the Internet exploded from a Department of Defense project into an interconnected global web that spurred promises of a new era of comity. The Snowden leaks called into question the Internet’s role as a symbol of free speech and empowerment. If the net were seen as a means of widespread surveillance, the resulting paranoia might affect the way people used it. Nations outraged at US intelligence-gathering practices used the disclosures to justify a push to require data generated in their countries to remain there, where it could not easily be hoovered by American spies. Implementing such a scheme could balkanize the web, destroying its open essence and dramatically raising the cost of doing business....
