Category Archives: Surveillance state

Yves here. When Edward Snowden began revealing the true scope of the surveillance state and the degree to which major American tech and communications companies were partners, Ed Harrison almost immediately recognized how damaging the news was to the cloud computing model. Yours truly, among others, wondered how quickly some countries would try to regain control of their Internet architecture, at least to keep the NSA from snooping on strictly domestic communications. That trend would also favor non-US service and equipment providers. For instance, a book I’m reading now, Spies for Hire by Tim Shorrock, mentions in passing that the NSA wanted to restrict US companies developing stronger forms of encryption because if they got too good, the NSA would not be able to crack it either. The Americans were very unhappy, and argued that that restriction would enable Europeans and the Japanese to take the lead in that field. The solution? The NSA let our domestic players go ahead as long as they got secret decryption keys. Mind you, this tidbit was public knowledge before the Snowden exposes, but remember also that aside from websites that needed encryption to allow for Internet commerce, most people didn’t give encryption a passing thought. These sort of security/privacy issues have gone mainstream, to the detriment of some US players.