How the NSA Is Harming America's Economy 330
anagama writes "According to an article at Medium, 'Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. ... Cisco saw orders in Brazil drop 25% and Russia drop 30%. ... Analysts had expected Cisco's business in emerging markets to increase 6%, but instead it dropped 12%, sending shares of Cisco plunging 10% in after-hours trading.' This is in addition to the harm caused to remote services that may cost $35 billion over the next three years. Then, of course, there are the ways the NSA has made ID theft easier. ID theft cost Americans $1.52 billion in 2011, to say nothing of the time wasted in solving ID theft issues — some of that figure is certainly attributable to holes the NSA helped build. The NSA, its policies, and the politicians who support the same are directly responsible for massive losses of money and jobs."
tough love (Score:5, Interesting)
#include "grumpycat"
printf("good!\n");
seriously, I would not trust US hardware and software, either.
but then again, those routers are already at every choke-point on the internet. the US owns the internet (public one, anyway) in all practical ways.
but for private networks when you can pick which routers and switches you want to deploy, picking a US based vendor would not be wise. I would not do it if I was in charge of a private network.
maybe its time we consider going back to software (oss) based networking gear. it will be much slower than hardware based ones but we can't verify hardware designs like we can software ones.
there is also no way to put this genie back into the bottle. once your cred is gone, its gone. and the US has lost ALL cred when it comes to safeguarding your privacy.
sad but true. as a US citizen, I am sorry for how badly we have botched the world's trust.
Re:And everyone on Slashdot cares about Cisco (Score:5, Interesting)
From one perspective some of us do care - they do make stuff that works reasonably well.
But my suspicion is that there's more to this than just abandoning Cisco. In many cases it's a lot cheaper to set up a router based on a PC and Linux, which probably is what happens in "emerging markets".
As for the NSA - they could probably do a lot better for the economy if they did put their effort into tracking down and nuking scammers, spammers and other internet pests - and their karma would be better. And they better use the CIA and others to really "take care" of those problems.
Re:You mean Massive Increase in jobs and spending (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Misleading Title (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't just Cisco. No-one can trust US technology any more; they've got from the most trusted on the planet to, at best, no better than the Chinese, in the space of a few months.
I'm out! (Score:4, Interesting)
When SOPA was a looming thing, I was in the market to move from shared hosting to a VPS, and so I made it a point to chose a VPS that was in another country.
Sadly, I chose the Netherlands, who are NSA collaborators. I'm just waiting for a specific piece of software to be released, and I'm out of there and on to a new server in a new country - I'm thinking Switzerland right now. Iceland is too expensive.
If its made in the USA - I don't trust it (Score:5, Interesting)
TSA also hurting US economy (Score:4, Interesting)
Not just the NSA, but the TSA aswell. Myself and many other Canadians that I know refuse to vacation in the States anymore because of the invasive border checks.
It will take time, not happen all at once (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all go bankrupt at once because of this.
That is extremely unlikely. What is more plausible, however, is:
1. They continue to lose the confidence of international customers.
2. Those customers seek alternative arrangements that they consider more trustworthy, possibly ad-hoc ones at first.
3. Over time, a new generation of more structured alternatives begins to develop to supply the new market demand, offering similar services and products to the big name US brands.
Some of these may be direct commercial competitors, but that's not really the concern for the current market leaders, because the barrier to entry for anyone trying to compete head-on is huge. Probably the greater risk is collaborative movements, whether Open Source tools or simply a degree of standardisation and compatibility between smaller vendors that means you can build (for example) a heterogenous network using a pool of specialist vendors and have a good chance of it working.
This is potentially toxic to broad US vendors such as Cisco in the networking space or the big cloud services companies who ideally want you to outsource almost your entire IT infrastructure to them alone. Which brings us on to...
4. Even in the US, long-time and lucrative customers start second-guessing whether they still need US IT Brand X, and those brands start losing serious money to both the foreign movements and, over time, also to new competitors in the US who are riding the open/collaboration wave to get a disruptive foothold in the market.
And at that point, the big US vendors are really in trouble.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:tough love (Score:2, Interesting)
A final note: the annual production capacity of the Oak Ridge uranium bomb works was between 2 and 4 U-235 bombs. Thus, another Little Boy would not have been ready until November or December of 1945, assuming sufficient stocks of uranium were available from which U-235---highly enriched, bomb grade uranium---could be manufactured. (I have seen some authors dispute exactly how much uranium the US actually had at war's end; it may be that this is the source of the oft-repeated and totally mistaken idea that there were only 2 US bombs in all.) However, the Hanford plutonium works was capable of much greater production. According to a memo written by Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer to General George Marshall, by the time Operation OLYMPIC, the US invasion of Japan, was due to commence in November, 1945, there would have been as many as twelve (12) P-239 Fat Man bombs available for use. Marshall wanted to use 9 of them as tactical nukes against the landing areas of Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese Home Island which was the target of the US invasion.
And for more clarification if any is needed, the oil refinery attack bombing of the Nippon Oil Refinery at Tsuchizaki near Akita, 300 miles north of Tokyo, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, was part of a maximum conventional bombing effort that was ordered when Japan still did not surrender in the days immediately following the second atomic mission. While the parts for a third atomic bomb were already being assembled and were in fact in the pipeline for delivery on target, a third atomic mission never took place. The last aerial bombardments of the war were conventional, not nuclear, attacks.
Re:tough love (Score:5, Interesting)