Blowback from the NSA surveillance.

When I wrote my representative, this point is what I stressed.<p>Strong privacy protections will become a competitive advantage for nations going forward, and the US will lose business if they maintain the right to spy on &#x27;foreign&#x27; communications which pass through their network (or don&#x27;t).<p>Many Americans and EU citizens alike would probably pay extra for services which are incorporated and hosted in countries with strong, enforced privacy regulations. Some organisations may be <i>required</i> to use services with strong privacy protections located outside of the US.

The last sentence is very true, but what makes me really sad is that the consequences of this leak is that at least in Germany and UK, the government look for ways to fast-track the same kind of surveillance system. They want the same thing for themselves!

Last night I was talking to a friend.<p>Instead of using Skype we used mumble hosted on a server he controls, over SSL.<p>The repercussions of this will be huge. It is an international mess. I&#x27;m Canadian, and now I find myself concerned and wondering how I can, if I can, secure my communications.

Rumors about Echolon were around since 1980ties. There were dozen cases that confirms surveillance over last 10 years. And most governments know about this already, they have similar project or were part of it.<p>So nothing is going to change. Nobody will use PGP because &quot;it is too hard&quot;. Everyone will stay on Facebook. And soon networks like Tor will get shutdown . And cryptography will become illegal word-wide (already is in UK). Welcome to 21st century.

&gt;&gt; The revelations that have emerged will undoubtedly trigger a reaction abroad as policymakers and ordinary users realize the huge disadvantages of their dependence on U.S.-controlled networks in social media, cloud computing, and telecommunications, and of the formidable resources that are deployed by U.S. national security agencies to mine and monitor those networks. &lt;&lt;<p>I think the author doesn&#x27;t go far enough, and it should read &quot;users realize the huge disadvantages of their dependence on ANY PUBLIC networks&quot;. It doesn&#x27;t matter if it is [directly] U.S.-controlled or not, since other networks are controlled by their respective gov. agencies in that particular countries [or soon will be], and the data can be traded&#x2F;exchanged.<p>It seems to me this is a trouble for the whole Internet [or soon will be]; it&#x27;s not U.S.-specific problem.

&quot;We can&#x27;t fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don&#x27;t see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.&quot;<p>Er, how is unregulated spying on non-Americans, fighting for internet freedom around the world?<p>I take internet freedom to mean the USA has the world wide freedom to spy on non people.... sorry, non Americans.<p>The blow back I would start worrying about is if the countries or the likes of the EU start walling off the internet, sort of like China, to keep American spying out. I now wonder if the Chinese firewall is as much about internal control as it is defensive.<p>American actually risks the break up of the internet as one single thing, unless it begins to respect people who are not American.

On the phrase <i>new internet nationalism</i> I would like to point out I snuck in the nominal country of &#x27;AA&#x27; to an IETF internet standards draft recently to informally establish it as a potential touchpoint&#x2F;alias for the internet at large.<p><i>IIBAN subsumes the position of National Numbering Authority (NNA) for the nominal [ISO3166] &#x27;nation&#x27; of AA (the Internet) in order to provide a financial endpoint registrar service for the internet community.</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;draft-stanish-iiban-01" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;draft-stanish-iiban-01</a><p>It&#x27;s pretty token at this point, but I would be thrilled to see others pick this up and run with it! (PS: New revision of that draft out soon.)

I wish Bruce was right, but the interception of so much internet traffic is hugely valuable to the US (not just security but commercial spying too). Therefore it will use all the leverage it can with its trade treaties etc to lean on sufficient countries that it will maintain if not escalate its control of the main internet routing systems.

The problem they&#x27;ll notice will be the slide in demand for our software and internet services. We&#x27;ll get hit in the wallet and they&#x27;ll wake up. Because the US loves a lot of stuff. But money always come first.