5 Ways Mass Surveillance Is Destroying Our Economy

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Prosperity Requires Privacy

Privacy is a prerequisite for a prosperous economy. Even the White House admits:

People must have confidence that data will travel to its destination without disruption. Assuring the free flow of information, the security and privacy of data, and the integrity of the interconnected networks themselves are all essential to American and global economic prosperity, security, and the promotion of universal rights.

Below, we discuss five ways that mass surveillance hurts our economy.

1. Foreigners Stop Buying American

Foreigners are starting to shy away from U.S. Internet companies, due to the risk that American spooks will spy on them.

American tech companies – including Verizon, Cisco, IBM and others – are getting hammered for cooperating with the NSA and failing to protect privacy. The costs to the U.S. economy have been estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And see this and this.

That doesn’t even take into account the just-revealed NSA program of infecting virtually all popular Western hard drives with spyware. This will cause huge markets like China to insist that locally-produced hard drives be used, to make it harder for the NSA to hack into them.

So the NSA’s shenanigans are hurting dual pillars of the U.S. tech sector: computers and Internet. (The sale of mobile devices might not be far behind.)

2. Trust and the Rule of Law – Two Main determinants of Prosperity – Are Undermined By Surveillance

Trust is KEY for a prosperous economy. It’s hard to trust when your government, your internet service provider and your favorite websites are all spying on you.

The destruction of privacy by the NSA directly harms internet companies, Silicon Valley, California … and the entire U.S. economy (Facebook lost 11 millions users as of April mainly due to privacy concerns … and that was before the Snowden revelations). If people don’t trust the companies to keep their data private, they’ll use foreign companies.

And destruction of trust in government and other institutions is destroying our economy.

A top cyber security consultant points out:

If privacy is not protected while performing mass surveillance for national security purposes, then the people’s level of trust in the government decreases.

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