(InformationWeek) Mounting evidence points to billions of dollars in lost US business thanks to the NSA's collect-everything mindset.
The United Arab Emirates, which signed a $926 million contract last year with two French firms to buy two intelligence satellites, said this week that the deal would be cancelled unless the firms (Airbus Defense & Space and Thales Alenia) removed US-built components. The UAE's fear was that the equipment would contain back doors that would allow data sent to ground stations to be intercepted.
Facing a major customer defection, will the French firms -- or, for that matter, anyone else trying to land a foreign contract -- continue to work with American component builders? Mounting evidence suggests otherwise.
Brian Honan, an independent security consultant in Dublin, wrote in a recent SANS Institute newsletter, "I have seen similar moves by clients in their 'Request for Tenders' where they specifically highlight data is not to be stored in US data centers or with US-based cloud providers." He said US tech companies have "a lot of reputational damage to repair for a lot of European-based organizations, [following] the revelations about NSA backdoors and spying allegations."
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