[anon1385]

>Is Facebook usage down? Gmail? LinkedIn? Twitter? I doubt any of those SaaS services are hurting as a result of the NSA scandal, and those are some of the ones that were specifically mentioned as rich data sources for the g-men.

The stories about the NSA breaking into foreign companies for economics reasons got less traction then the consumer social networks because they were less relevant to most of the public, but they are far more relevant to the people making operational decisions in non-US organisations that compete with US companies. For example, how many big Brazilian companies are going to trust Google Docs now that we know that Brazilian companies were spied on by the NSA to steal corporate secrets to aid American companies interests? For those organisations the risks are not theoretical ones about LOVEINT, personal privacy or a slippery slope into fascism. The risks are real and current and those companies are confirmed targets which the US will use any tactic to undermine. Non-American corporations are the targeted enemies of the NSA, and thus the targeted enemies of Amazon, Google and all the other US SaaS providers. For non-US corporations to use those services would be like Obama hosting his email with the North Korean government.