[bobzibub]

There are other costs outside of the US also: Given that the NSA is so aggressive (all pipes being suspect now) the changes politically demanded will:

-lessen convenience of all software and increasing the costs for users to interact with it in terms of time and complexity.

-building and deploying security solutions can be expensive especially to those products that do not lend themselves to security--more engineering increases costs.

-increase in cpu cycles as we all increase key sizes and introduce encryption where once there was none, or limited for authentication only.

Id bet this will be a small drag on the world economy and certainly a drag on the world software industry. It could be thought of as a world wide tax.

[fragsworth]

There could be a slightly brighter side to it, if you consider the additional security to be a good thing.