I agree with most comments here. This was expected, these are not empty threats and no one is over-reacting. Everyone is just re-acting as they were expected too. Except maybe the Obama administration, which has to do some hard decisions. Snowden is growing stronger by the day now.

The part that caught my eye though was this:

> It's not all doom and gloom, however. Thompson's comments show that some U.S. firms stand to benefit from distrust of the U.S. government, and that a new model may be in the offing for protecting sensitive data from the NSA's prying eyes.

Apparently, Bloomberg sticks to the Liberal mantra that says more or less that when a market dies a new one emerges.

Maybe the 5% of affected population, in terms of companies, will build a new business model but how this is good news is beyond me. It's like when you listen people saying that YOU can now create a startup in TV because they saw a Steve Jobs 2-minute video documentary on Apple. People apparently don't know that for every successful startup there are 1.000.000 failed for no apparent reason.