Big Brother’s Damage

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/243852/big-brothers-damage/

Big Brother’s Damage
Le Devoir, Canada
By Claude Lévesque
Translated By Charlie Hersh
31 July 2014
Edited by Emily France

In the United States, they have begun evaluating the cost of the many collateral damage effects the National Security Agency has caused through its full-scale espionage. This regards the cost of the quality of democratic life and the financial cost.

It has impacted freedom of the press. In Canada, the government has forbidden the majority of its civil servants from discussing the files under their care with journalists, even if national security is not at risk. On top of this, in the United States, they have injected into the minds of officials the idea that, almost certainly, their telephone and email conversations are being intercepted and filed, and could be used against them at any given moment.

And then, they think about what Edward Snowden and the private Chelsea Manning — the WikiLeaks source for Julian Assange — went through, and they tell themselves that the same could happen to them. They think twice before giving information to members of the fourth estate.

~snip~

In hard cash, who is it that pays the great price of the damage the NSA has caused, or – if you prefer – because Edward Snowden revealed its dubious practices in plain sight? According to The New America Foundation, an American think tank, it is primarily the “cloud computing” industry and its associated sectors, including server manufacturers: This primarily includes Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Forrester Research, an American consulting firm, calculates that the losses for "cloud" service providers could reach up to $180 billion between now and 2016. We are not going to cry, but it's an immense sum if the estimate confirms itself as realistic.