> Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/etc are after your money, they only protect your rights if it means "more money", not if it threatens to impact their profit.

That's a wild generalization and baseless accusation.

First of all, collaborating with the NSA brings nothing to their bottom line, only infrastructure costs. Second, they are forbidden to be honest about NSA's demands and therefore this has hurt their image in the international market-place.

Maybe most of us were aware that our communications are intercepted, but we had no idea to what extent that happens. As a non-US citizen, I now think twice about collaborating with US-based companies. And it's not because I fear the NSA, I really don't, but rather because I'm thinking that the same backdoors these companies were forced to build can be discovered and used by other organizations that may be closer to home.

And even worse than that - as a non-US citizen I am not represented by any of your officials and suing anybody in the US would be totally unfeasible because of costs. The only thing I can do is to loudly complain about it on the Internet or to my acquaintances and that's about it. If it were my own government doing this shit - at the very least I'd have other options.

Make no mistake - the credibility of all US-based companies suffers and because of this you will see in the following years a lot of (1) proposals for country-wide Intranets, (2) governments switching to their own forks of open-source software and (3) businesses switching to local software providers and so on. You can already see signs of this happening and it's precisely companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo that will take the biggest hit.

And I fear that US citizens and officials aren't taking this seriously - as if us, non-US citizens should have expected this surveillance, without thinking that the US placed itself as the guardian of the Internet, that trust has now been eroded and the effects (e.g. country-wide Intranets, local software achieving monopoly by government intervention, etc) will be negative for everybody.

EDIT: speak of the devil - http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-142_en.htm

> > Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/etc are after your money, they only protect your rights if it means "more money", not if it threatens to impact their profit. > > That's a wild generalization and baseless accusation.

Global surveillence is (part of) these companies' business models. They don't support privacy, they just disagree on who should be allowed to do the snooping.

> They are forbidden to be honest about NSA's demands and therefore this has hurt their image in the international market-place.

The problem is that these demands are possible to fulfil in the first place. Solving that problem would force these companies to find new cash cows.

Surveillance is arguably part of these companies' business models. However we are talking about their own stuff, their own products, their own servers and I expect them to be upfront about it (e.g. hey, we are using your data for ads targeting) and to fix vulnerabilities that may allow third-parties to access my data ilegaly or to harm me.

With NSA we are talking about something different. If the NSA can engage in subverting encryption standards, there's no end to what they can do. If they ask Google to plant a backdoor in the Chrome binary, or Microsoft to plant a backdoor in Windows, or Apple to plant a backdoor in iOS/OS X, thus removing Google/Microsoft/Apple in the connection between me and them - I'll never find out about it and my software will be defective "by design" and as I've said, my personal fear is not the NSA, but rather organizations that are closer to home. For example, if backdoors in the software that I use exist, then they can be discovered by organized crime syndicates that say, are in the business of stealing credit cards, or whatever.

Can Google/Microsoft/Apple/Yahoo promise to do the right thing with such possible exploits? Can they promise to fix them, as they are discovered? Of course not. Hence, I cannot trust them anymore, because it is not in them that I have to trust.

> The problem is that these demands are possible to fulfil in the first place.

Well, shit happens all the time, mail accounts get hacked and so on. To me the real problem is that the software that I use may be defective by design and I cannot trust these providers to fix it or to tell me about it. Voting with my wallet also doesn't work anymore, as long as the alternative is still a US-based company and in this regard I now feel that all US-based companies are equal. Yahoo even tried fighting warrantless spying and failed and we found out about it only because of Snowden's leaks. So even if they want to do the right thing, they can't.