Forget talk of loss of liberty. Let’s talk about losing hard cash.
The revelations about U.S. surveillance leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is costing U.S. businesses millions of dollars in curtailed sales of cloud computing services and web hosting overseas, says the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute in a new report.
The report predicts that “the cloud computing industry is particularly vulnerable and could lose billions of dollars in the next three to five years due to NSA surveillance.”
This will come as no surprise to those who have been following the leaks and what the revealed practices mean for tech firms. A prior report from the Information Technology Innovation Foundation pegged the lost to U.S. firms at $35 billion over the next five years, says Bloomberg.
The New America Foundation’s report outlines not only direct costs to U.S. businesses but potential future costs in the form of foreign government policy changes. It also says there is a cost of the world markets losing trust in American firms.
The report’s authors call on strong controls on the surveillance, such as prohibiting the NSA from collecting bulk data.
Meanwhile, Sen. Patrick Leahy is expected to unveil today a package of reforms that limit the NSA, Reuters reports.
The Vermont Democrat’s bill proposes more controls on the collection of bulk data of American phone records and Internet data. With the backing of the White House, the bill is expected to be embraced by those who criticized the House bill that passed in May for being too weak on reform.
Above: Sen. Patrick Leahy (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
