Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveillance

Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

There is no doubt the integrity of our communications and the privacy of our online activities have been the biggest casualty of the NSAs unfettered surveillance of our digital lives. But the ongoing revelations of government eavesdropping has had a profound impact on the economy, the security of the internet and the credibility of the U.S. governments leadership when it comes to online governance.

These are among the many serious costs and consequences the NSA and those who sanctioned its activitiesincluding the White House, the Justice Department and lawmakers like Sen. Dianne Feinsteinapparently have not considered, or acknowledged, according to a report by the New America Foundations Open Technology Institute.

Too often, we have discussed the National Security Agencys surveillance programs through the distorting lens of a simplistic security versus privacy narrative, said Danielle Kehl, policy analyst at the Open Technology Institute and primary author of the report. But if you look closer, the more accurate story is that in the name of security, were trading away not only privacy, but also the U.S. tech economy, internet openness, Americas foreign policy interests and cybersecurity.

Over the last year, documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, have disclosed numerous NSA spy operations that have gone beyond what many considered acceptable surveillance activity. These included infecting the computers of network administrators working for a Belgian telecom in order to undermine the companys routers and siphon mobile traffic; working with companies to install backdoors in their products or network infrastructure or to devise ways to undermine encryption; intercepting products that U.S. companies send to customers overseas to install spy equipment in them before they reach customers.

The Foundations report, released today, outlines some of the collateral damage of NSA surveillance in several areas, including:

The economic costs of NSA surveillance can be difficult to gauge, given that it can be hard to know when the erosion of a companys business is due solely to anger over government spying. Sometimes, there is little more than anecdotal evidence to go on. But when the German government, for example, specifically cites NSA surveillance as the reason it canceled a lucrative network contract with Verizon, there is little doubt that U.S. spying policies are having a negative impact on business.

[T]he ties revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms in the wake of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) affair show that the German government needs a very high level of security for its critical networks, Germanys Interior Ministry said in a statement over the canceled contract.

Could the German government simply be leveraging the surveillance revelations to get a better contract or to put the US on the defensive in foreign policy negotiations? Sure. That may also be part of the agenda behind data localization proposals in Germany and elsewhere that would force telecoms and internet service providers to route and store the data of their citizens locally, rather than let it pass through the U.S.

But, as the report points out, the Germans have not been alone in making business decisions based on NSA spying. Brazil reportedly scuttled a $4.5 billion fighter jet contract with Boeing and gave it to Saab instead. Sources told Bloomberg News [t]he NSA problem ruined it for the US defense contractor.

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Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveillance