POSTED BY Grant Bowen
Rolling scandal over National Security agency surveillance, triggered by a mass leak of secrets by Edward Snowden, as well as further revelations of spying on allies, continues to follow President Obama and the U.S. Government. Due to this, various experts are worried of two results: the government is suffering in its relationships with allies and cryptography, which has continuously formed the backbone of U.S. surveillance programs, and simultaneous the public may be damaged by cloud computing surveillance.
Primarily, experts are concerned about the extent to which the US can successfully exert “soft power” through political and cultural values, while simultaneously lowering its military presence throughout the world. It was intended that through networks of friends and allies, the U.S. could extend this “soft power” and influence more countries through peace, rather than war-tactics. Maintaining and establishing more alliances through this method will help to mitigate consequences of lessening military might.
However, the current surveillance problems do harm to this plan. In order to establish “soft power” in the first place, there has to be a baseline level of trust. The global opinion of America is hardly positive at the moment, though. Coming off a long government shutdown, and repeated surveillance scandals, American status has suffered. If the long-term plan is to carefully manage military decline, while preserving maximum influence, surveillance issues can’t continue. They repeatedly break down the requisite trust in order to successfully follow such a plan.
Furthermore, NSA surveillance issues continue to wreak havoc for the American public. Primarily, many organizations have noted access to stored data in the public cloud, even though the U.S. insisted it was only doing so to track suspected terrorist activities overseas. However, both Microsoft’s Office 365 and SharePoint Online experienced NSA surveillance activity (whether they were “accidents” or purposeful is still disputed). Due to the large universe of SharePoint and other online services (think Apple’s iCloud or Google Online Doc Suite), smaller providers, cloud computing services and others are feeling the influence. They are putting their cloud migration plans on hold, or simply terminating those already occurring. In fact, according to one study, nearly 35% of those with plans to migrate to cloud computing are now in a holding pattern.
It may need to go without say that there is a question of whether the NSA security “surveillance” tactics raise issues of legality. According to Congress, and the Supreme Court the processes employed by the NSA do not violate the 4th amendment “as long as the government can show that it is relevant to an authorized investigation into known – and, significantly – unknown terrorists who may be in the United States.” Yet, legality, as determined by the government, does not answer the question of what the long-term effects of such surveillance will be. As we have seen already it could affect as much as international political relationships, or simply public and commercial computing access.
