American companies are losing tens of billions of dollars of business because Glenn Greenwald said a thing.
From the Washington Post
U.S. cloud providers have already lost business over the NSA leaks, but now the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has a report putting a dollar amount on the short-term costs: $21.5 to $35 billion over the next three years.
ITIF based these estimates in part on the Cloud Security Alliance survey showing that 10 percent of officials at non-U.S. companies cancelled contracts with U.S. providers and 56 percent of non-U.S. respondents are hesitant to work with U.S. cloud based operators after the leaks.
The cloud computing industry is big business: it’s estimated to be a $131 billion market by the end of 2013, and a $207 billion market by 2016. The U.S. has historically dominated the space. But after the Snowden leaks detailed the level of access the NSA has to data hosted by U.S. companies, European officials and cloud providers raised privacy alarm bells.
This leads ITIF to conclude the NSA leaks “will likely have an immediate and lasting impact on the competitiveness of the U.S. cloud computing industry if foreign customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefits.”
Who has Snowden’s leaks and Greenwald’s witch hunt hurt the most?
The intelligence community?
No. It will hurt American businesses that have nothing to do with the NSA more than anyone else. Because supposedly they have secret back doors that the NSA can access on a whim.
Of course we know that’s not true, but a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.