"destroy" is hyperbole, but it's certainly going to have a chilling effect. We can't ignore the elephant in the room any longer - our utopian global human internet is actually just a US government controlled plaything.
My company provides a service to the government sector in Australia, hosted on Google's Appengine. We've been negotiating a blanket deal with a government department, and I can see that we're going to have to answer some very hard questions about the security of their data after this. Winning this deal would make a ten-fold increase in hosting costs irrelevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they even offered to pay us more to host in Australia just for their peace of mind.
Most of us learn as kids how asymmetrical trust is, and how once you're caught lying no-one believes your apologies or promises to mend your ways. Before PRISM, it was only the cynics muttering about how the US Government saw everything we did. Post PRISM, most non-US companies (and probably many US companies too) will be looking for neutral alternatives to US services.
My company provides a service to the government sector in Australia, hosted on Google's Appengine. We've been negotiating a blanket deal with a government department, and I can see that we're going to have to answer some very hard questions about the security of their data after this. Winning this deal would make a ten-fold increase in hosting costs irrelevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they even offered to pay us more to host in Australia just for their peace of mind.
Most of us learn as kids how asymmetrical trust is, and how once you're caught lying no-one believes your apologies or promises to mend your ways. Before PRISM, it was only the cynics muttering about how the US Government saw everything we did. Post PRISM, most non-US companies (and probably many US companies too) will be looking for neutral alternatives to US services.
And Richard Stallman... proved right yet again!