We'd brought up a wafer fab in the Hsinchu Scientific Park in Taiwan before - so we weren't strangers to the concerns about industrial espionage. Several of us have done a lot of work with the government and we'd manufactured some very sensitive products (as does the current business).
My apology is really around the fact that at the time we were trusting that such programs would not exist here (this was before explained Echelon to us), and that the US didn't work that way. I was naive and I was wrong.
we were trusting that such programs would not exist here
It's still not clear what programs you are talking about. Because google provides no access logs "someone could go into our account and take confidential information, and we would never know". What does that have to do with Echelon or Prism?
Yet most of the managers I see who make this decision just don't care. They ignore the advice of their systems admins and follow the old adage "you can't get fired for buying IBM" like sheep to a slaughter. It's typical of the short-term mindset that drives so many business decisions.
I chalk this up to a lack of education, both in business and IT. While CS professors obsess over data structures and algorithms, and non-IT departments preach about the relevance of the next quarter's results, "Rome is burning".