Working for a small company who does business by selling small games, we have recently added a new networking component to allow people to chat while in game, make purchases online, etc. We use highly sanitized data so that even if someone captures our entire database, putting it back together is nigh impossible. So recently we talked about moving our server to Amazon because of bandwidth and latency.

But now with revelations of NSA, Amazon is no longer a viable option. We instead decided to host everything internally, behind pix, expand our infrastructure, and avoid the compromises that are sure to come as a result of the NSA backdoors that are ubiquitous. Every two days there is a new reveal from the NSA that they are invading users’ privacy even more or that they have some new back door previously unknown.

Is my company an outlier… probably. However, I know other startups that are also gnashing their teeth similarly and opting to not use Amazon or Google because of that. Add to that Apple’s vulnerability revealed last week (the developer site was compromised and possibly all developer info was stolen) and going to the Cloud is not even a good idea anymore.

. . .

Add to this the fact that most growth in the economy starts with small companies (depending on how you do the numbers), and if a lot more small companies are opting to take the more “secure” route and avoid Amazon because of the NSA, then this means that the NSA is in effect creating a new market. Already, new secure email systems are popping up (hushmail.com), secure chat (tox.im), and docs and on and on. These NSA revelations are having a profound impact, and the older companies like Google (15 years old) and Yahoo (only 18 years old now) are going to struggle being shackled to US Government bureaucracy and the NSA. In other words, the long slide away from being able to do business has already started for these well-established companies. Even Microsoft (especially them) admitted putting backdoors into Windows, and last week, I began REALLY using linux … which I have only been tinkering with for 15 years now.