NSA Spying Is For Profit, Not To Find Terrorists

The cloud computing industry is big business: it’s estimated to be a $131 billion market by the end of 2013, and a $207 billion market by 2016. The U.S. has historically dominated the space. But after the Snowden leaks detailed the level of access the NSA has to data hosted by U.S. companies, European officials and cloud providers raised privacy alarm bells.
This leads ITIF to conclude the NSA leaks “will likely have an immediate and lasting impact on the competitiveness of the U.S. cloud computing industry if foreign customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefits.”
Even before the NSA leaks, there were rumblings that data given to U.S. companies wasn’t safe from U.S. law enforcement thanks to the Patriot Act — some of which were validated by Microsoft’s admission that even E.U.-based cloud data hosted by the company was subject to the law. The European Parliament raised those concerns in an October 2012 report about privacy in the cloud.

National Security Agency surveillance of Americans' telephone and Internet communications has caused a backlash among many large technology companies that want to disclose more information about the government's data requests.

But there's another reason companies such as Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Facebook (FB) want off the leash: money. According to public policy think-tank Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), cooperating with the NSA's PRISM electronic surveillance program will cost the U.S. cloud computing industry an estimated $35 billion over the next three years and have a lasting impact of the industry's global competitiveness.