Agreed. Of course, it's going to end badly for Americans in general. The "undue burden on the government" reasoning has been used to weaken almost every right that we have. Police don't have to announce themselves before entering, or even have a warrant (if they get one later), because these things would constitute an "undue burden". It is a very strange loophole that the government uses, again and again, to break the law. My rights are worthless if they inconvenience a police officer. And in this case, a companies rights are worthless if they inconvenience law-enforcement.
I think it's time we hang up the "undue burden" loophole once and for all. The constraints on behavior our laws represent should not be conditional on convenience, particularly not on the convenience of law-enforcement.
What's wrong with undue burden on police and government? The constitution itself provides for many such burdens specifically to prevent an overzealous government from overstepping its power. The courts can and have applied such arguments to specific portions of the constitution, generally with great success. What gives law enforcement the right to be free of undue burden anyway?
It's astounding that it seems that few in the US government seem to acknowledge that we may not be on top always, and what goes around comes around. There will be real future costs for our moral corruptness.
A danger for US companies is that their business will be cut off from 95% of markets, because of US government policies.
I'm not saying that it's good practice to do what the U.S. did and I am appalled. However, they will not lose 95% of the markets, at least not now. There is currently no country with the capacity to generate as many new ideas into businesses, and the U.S. is roughly 25% of the worlds entire economy. Hell, just California is the worlds 7th largest economy.
Further, you don't think the other large nations (by economy), such as Japan, China, India, Russia, the U.K. are not doing/going to do the same thing (I omitted Germany and France since they seem to not wire tap.. Not necessarily true).
Business wouldn't and wont be cut 95%, I am pretty sure most countries are grateful the U.S. is setting precedent and will request them to issue warrants on their citizens.
Currently non-US economies represent 82% of the world. Non-US Internet users represent 90%. Non-US people are 95% of the world.
And the US is not growing its share of world GDP, Internet usage, nor population.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)#...
I'd argue that the "wealth" (aka "valuation") of many US Internet companies is increasingly dependent on a larger user base instead of a richer one. Facebook paying $16B to acquire Whatsapp (and its 450M decidedly non-wealthy users) comes to mind.
You can remove France from that very short list. It has been revealed that France does its own surveillance on its own population, and exchanges this data with the USA through the Lustre program [0], revealed in a German newspaper [1].
What's even more interesting is that the USA has little penetration in Africa's surveillance, but due to its history, France has a very strong presence there: Most of the intercontinental cables end in France, and the biggest telecom operator (Orange, ex France Telecom) is present in pretty much in every french-speaking country in Africa, along with Bull-Amesys, the one that installed the shiny surveillance toy for Al-Assad.
If the USA wants intelligence on Africa, signing a deal with France was a very important move. The french press not saying anything about it says everything about the level of independence and journalism.
[0] http://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2013/10/30/surve...
[1] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/codename-lustre-frankreic...
Given recent trends, US users will within a decade represent 5% of world-wide users, with relatively more expensive and narrower bandwidth at their disposal.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
It's fascinating to see how some people seem to find silly the idea that their domestic government could be on their side.
I hope you realize that the US most definitely does all of that inside the US too! The NSA's pretending to only target "Outsiders" only serves to make the all-encompassing surveillance more abstract, and thus somewhat more palatable to the local masses.
The EU data protection bans storage of data about EU citizens outside the EU. Eventually the ban may have to include storage of data by US companies, even if in the EU.
This is going to end badly for American Internet companies. It's not just the NSA scandals. Americans need to realize that people outside the US have options, and at some point it will become a major handicap to be a US business -- seen as a conduit for US government power and spying.
I don't see how the US could or will step back from these abuses of power.