How the NSA Is Harming American Businesses

In his most recent interview given as part of the New York Film Festival on Saturday, Oct. 11, Edward Snowden was very clear: Get rid of Dropbox in favor of Spider Oak; stay away from Facebook and Google; DuckDuckGo is more secure.

In the game of globalization, the country with the largest domestic market wins. Under Clinton, the U.S. encouraged globalization, but today, two markets are bigger than its own: the European Union and China. Europe? As Kissinger said, “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” And then, there’s China, which is protecting its internal market and undervaluing its currency. Apple’s response was a “China” division.

In 2001, Beijing joined the World Trade Organization. That same year, the U.S. adopted the Patriot Act: The National Security Agency can search American data centers anywhere in the world, in violation of international law. The Stasi’s motto was “To know everything,” just like the NSA today, which has become the very thing it wanted to fight against: the N-S-tasi! It should have remembered what Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”

Beijing Opts for Linux

Companies that are searched are forbidden from mentioning it, but in reality, the NSA can access any machine operating on OS X, iOS, Windows, Android, etc. No need to break in: There are backdoors which allow direct access, and that’s without mentioning nano-espionage on hardware. In December 2013, Der Spiegel made known the existence of a catalog — the “ANT catalog” — of the ways in which the NSA spies, and revealed that an NSA unit called the TAO can physically intercept deliveries of computers to plant nano-material in them or to create custom-made software faults.

Hence, Beijing’s is keenly interested in Linux, the most NSA-independent operating system today. France’s police and gendarmerie have also adopted Ubuntu, the most democratic version of Linux, improved by the gendarmerie under the name of GendBuntu in 2001. Interestingly, GendBuntu’s Wikipedia page only currently exists in French, English and Chinese, and for good reason: GendBuntu was the subject of a thorough case study by Beijing. Add to that the role that Facebook and Twitter can play in intercepting data, and you’ll understand the psychosis of China’s politburo. The upshot is that American companies are losing the world’s largest market, and globalization along with it.

Ethics According to Google

That’s the story of Google in China. When the company returned from Beijing, the Harvard Business School congratulated it on its ethical stance after it valiantly refused to dance with the devil, but what really happened? Beijing has created a market: “Would you like to set up in China? If so, then, you guarantee the complete inviolability of Chinese data.” Google acquiesces. Once home, the NSA has raises doubts: “No way!” Google goes back to China: “Cào nĭ mā!” China has now given its search engine market to Baidu, a company that could have been American if it weren’t for the anti-immigration laws passed by Bush, Jr. As for Google’s fine lesson in ethics, Eric Schmidt went off to sound out the market in North Korea less than a year later.

Fundamentally, China has only one policy: absolute sovereignty. It has given Facebook’s market to RenRen, Twitter’s to Weibo, Google’s to Baidu. Likewise, Russia has VKontakte and Yandex. As for IBM’s share of the market in China, it’s collapsed since the Snowden affair.

Charles Pasqua once said that “Democracy stops where the interests of the state begin.” And if only it were up to states to serve the people, and not the other way round. Nowadays, the N-S-tasi is driving American export companies out of business, using taxpayers’ money. It’s silly and a complete violation of human rights.* The N-S-tasi is recording our neuroses, fantasies and weaknesses, and it can publish our most compromising sexting; Snowden’s leaks are clear about this. The NSA must come back to the good side of the Force. Dwight Eisenhower understood it well: “The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.”

*Translator’s note: Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”.