http://www.dailydot.com/politics/nsa-prism-fallout-35-billion-us-tech-firms/U.S. companies will likely lose more than $35 billion in foreign business as a result of the vast NSA-surveillance operations revealed by Edward Snowden, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). "Foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies," the report asserts, causing American businesses to lose out on foreign contracts and pushing other countries to create protectionist policies that block American businesses out of foreign markets.
ITIF, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based technology think tank founded my members of Congress, first estimated in 2013 that American losses as a result of the National Security Agency's PRISM program, which centers on the collection of Internet communications from major American technology firms, would tally between $21.5 billion and $35 billion, with the U.S. cloud-computing industry bearing the brunt of the fallout. The actual losses "will likely far exceed $35 billion," according to the ITIF report, because the entire American tech industry has performed worse than expected as a result of the Snowden leaks.
