Trust, But Encrypt
It will come as no surprise that businesses outside of the US are now leery about storing their data inside American borders, as was shown in this survey reported by CIO magazine. Some non-Americans see the Snowden scandal as an opportunity (The Toronto Star reports that Canadian businesses are making a case that Canada is a safer place to put your data center); but in general this is bad news for global business. In particular it erodes the economic integration born over 25 years of NAFTA and undermines efforts to make similar trade agreements between the US and others.
There’s some irony here. Many years ago, the US government realized that every message passed through Research In Motion’s Network Operations Center in Waterloo, Canada. Knees jerked, and a threat to national security was declared; they even contemplated banning altogether the official use of blackberry devices. Fortunately for RIM (now Blackberry), the company was able to satisfy the powers that were that no one, even the company’s engineers, were able to read the encrypted messages that flowed through the NOC. That, and the users’ obsessive attachment to their blackberries, got RIM over this hurdle.
It’s a very human truth that we are most alarmed by characteristics and behaviors we observe around us when they are the very things we fear or loathe in ourselves. Bad breakups often feature a phase in which painfully ironic salvos are made following the formula “How dare you, of all people, call me self righteous!” So it has proven to be between US and foreign interests. Whereas once Americans purported to fear foreign snooping of their data outside of US jurisdiction, the Snowden scandal has shown that American’s misgivings reflected exactly the kind of activity, on a grand scale, that they were themselves engaged in.
Clearly it’s going to take more than assurances of legality and oversight to undo the harm to American and international business that America’s spying policies have wrought. The U.S. will recover from this, and may even shrug it off in short order; but good thing or bad, it’s another blow to American global preeminence.
