Representatives of Thales, the European defense technology giant, announced last week at the Eurosatory defense exposition that the company won a contract from the French government to supply 900,000 users of an inter-ministry network with secure Internet and intranet connections, plus related IT support and cybersecurity services.
Cybersecurity is now a $670 million business for the company and while Thales may have had an inside track for the French contract, American firms are increasingly getting the cold shoulder in Europe. Defense News reports that many European firms are seeing increased business largely because of one man - Edward Snowden or, perhaps more accurately, the NSA's insistence on making sure that they had the ability to collect information on anyone using products manufactured in the US. From the article:
"I do see a move to using European firms", said a French government source, "and the losses will be huge for US firms in the future. It's a very good thing for European companies. Thank you, Snowden."
Shortly after the National Security Agency whistleblower revealed details of data-sharing by US firms with Washington, one analyst predicted the American cloud computing industry could lose $35 billion in contracts by 2016 as companies and governments outside the US decided their data was safer elsewhere.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Tuesday June 24 2014, @03:51PM
I would imagine many companies in the US will also figure out that their data is safer elsewhere.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @04:28PM
Of course, why change the trends? After all the US Government has been encouraging the movement of most other business related functions over seas for decades. Before long the only thing left within the US for many companies may be last mile shipping handled by a Mexican trucking company.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @05:24PM
Don't forget the lawyers.
They are like cockroaches, and can't be exterminated completely.
Sounds like a crazy 'reality show' to me..."Lawyers vs. Truckers....who will dominate? Tune in tonight."
Unfortunately, I am too depressed to make the popcorn...this may require an ethanol IV, some hard drugs, and lots of LSD....
(Score: 1) by cykros on Tuesday June 24 2014, @05:39PM
Depression and LSD...what could possibly go wrong?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geotti on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:26PM
How about adding some good weed and psychedelic music to the mix, so the depression goes away?
(Score: 1) by cykros on Saturday July 05 2014, @02:42PM
Yea, I shouldn't be so quick to point out how poorly it can go, because with the right set and setting, LSD has shown quite a bit of promise in helping to treat depression. I was more remarking at how poorly it can go when people turn to haphazard LSD use as an escape while depressed, and can get sunk into a bit of a darker trip. Especially with the alcohol combination, depending of course how one responds to alcohol in the situation.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:31PM
> Don't forget the lawyers.
> They are like cockroaches, and can't be exterminated completely.
Outsourcing has hit lawyers pretty bad. [nytimes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:56PM
Oh, great! As if we didn't already have enough trouble with Legalese! Now it will be ESL Legalese compounded by regional dialects and accents.
Will they automate too? Robo-dial faxing of court documents? Teleconference court cases? etc,,, How long before we have an AI "Lawyer"?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bucc5062 on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:14PM
Oh the irony
US Lawyer: Sue em, they can't do that!
Other Lawyer: Um, sir, we can't sue em, we outsourced that job to India, you, do save money and make bigger profit for our partners
Actually, you do. That $500 and hour attorney is living in the US, buying products sold in the US (wont get into manufacturing) which means s/he is contributing to the jobs of distribution, sales, service in the United States. Now that $500 professional is paying taxes (at least some) back to Uncle Sam which in turn uses said taxes to try and keep the masses slightly less miserable so they don't revolt.
CEO: "I need to save money to maximize profits for this quarter for by GOD, its the law (it is not). Get rid of the programmers"
Flunky: Um sir, can't do that, they were already outsourced
CEO: Well then, dump those accountants, they can't seem to understand our tax laws anyway
Flunky: Um sir, we had already outsourced them to India as well
CEO: Dammit man, who's left to chop, We need profits NOW"
Flunky: There are those lawyers..
CEO: DONE!! Now figure out why no one is buying our products
I am completely baffled how disconnected US CEOs can be from reality. WHen you gut the professional class, when you drive your high 5 and low 6 figure people into survival mode, they are not going to spend money and that eventually returns in the form of dropping sales and a weak economy. Put it another way, The best way to maximize profits is not through reactive management, but through active management that requires a CEO to not only look at the impact to his/her bottom line, but how that affects the bottom line of a country. if you reduce the buying power of people then you negatively impact profits.
So yea team, we screwed it finally to the lawyers, only to find we screwed ourselves.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday June 25 2014, @07:26AM
It's a variation of the tragedy of the commons. Each CEO realizes that if they outsource they will gain an advantage, at the expense of the common good. Everyone does it and then finds that there is no common resource (consumers to sell to), by which point it is too late.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:21PM
But by that time, there will be enough customers to sell to in the country they outsourced to, while they can move on with their outsourcing to yet another country which is even cheaper (especially since in the previous one, the wages will have risen in the mean time).
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:44PM
I was always under the impression Lawyers were in demand as entry into the profession is quite demanding academically and also requires passing the bar exam. How wrong I was until a friend went to law school, graduated and passed the bar. She can barely find work as is now a lawyer temp taking whatever work she can find. She still lives at home with her parents. After all that hard work....
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:39AM
This has been apparent in NYC for the last decade, when I started meeting lawyers who had graduated from top law schools and couldn't find work. About 5 years ago I started hearing from friends who work at Wall Street banks and were not the top bond salesmen or CEOs or whatever, and they were getting laid off; the banks were bringing in H1-B's to replace them at a fraction of the cost. I confess I felt a moment of schadenfreude--they had all looked at me blankly when this sort of thing started happening to those of us in tech in 2000 and frequently spouted some free market dogma BS about "that's the way markets work."
Then I considered the consequences of this great hollowing out for the country. You don't have to cast that far forward to find that point at which people can't keep up appearances anymore because they've used up their savings and maxed out their cards, and they realize it's not just them it's happening to because everyone they know is going through it too, and they stop pretending that it's going to get better on its own. That is a social eruption in the making that will change the face of the map when it happens. And since this is America we're talking about, a place where the disconnect between reality and fantasy is huge and yawning, the reaction when that bubble bursts will be much more violent and outsized than a place like, say, Russia, where everyone is always waiting for the other shoe to drop anyway. There is no rock big enough, no hole deep enough, for the CEO's and current Masters of the Universe to hide under or in where they will escape that wrath.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @06:50AM
You seem to have been lost at least the last seven years:
People started taking debts once their savings were gone. Since those debts could be collateralized, they were pumped and dumped by the banks until it was impossible to keep doing it. Asset confidence plummeted, some banks went down the drain and the Federal Government had to put trillions of dollars at work to avoid a total economic meltdown. Some of that money ended buying bigger boats or giving splendid bonuses for some CEOs of those bankrupt banks. The whole story caused many people to say it wasn't fair and protest peacefully, it even got an easy to remember name: Occupy Wall Street. They were treated by mainstream media as terrorist commies who were plotting to destroy the very esence of America. For most people, it was forgotten the very same moment new photos of Kim Kardashian's butt appeared.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 25 2014, @02:05AM
> Don't forget the lawyers.
> They are like cockroaches, and can't be exterminated completely.
TAFTA/TTIP will fix that. It will enable them to sue other countries and steal their money, on a nation level.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Tuesday June 24 2014, @05:31PM
It would be except for that pesky matter of how to get it out of the country...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:15PM
That's easy. Encrypt before you send. Encrypt in transit. Encrypt at your destination.
Encrypt.
Not once. Not twice. Encrypt three times.
Don't trust your VPN. Its been owned.
Don't trust cloud storage companies. Especially Microsoft. [socialife.org.uk]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:57PM
What about leastauthority.com and spideroak.com? True it depends how paranoid you want to be, but encrypting client-side really should be secure when done properly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:15PM
Those are pretty close to ideal.
However never browse your archived data via a web browser. Always use their installable applications.
Server side decryption is required for web presentation, and that requires your password. They insist they never write your password to disk, and flush it as soon as your web session ends.
But Post Heartbleed, we all know that in-memory passwords can be grabbed. (although other than proof of concept, nobody has reported any actual success at this). Spideroak WEB servers WERE vulnerable to heartbleed [spideroak.com] but their CLIENT apps were not.
Leastauthority relies almost entirely on SSL, and their web interface was indeed vulnerable to heartbleed. Further, because even if you used ssh to access the LeastAuthority gateway, the backend between the gateway and the actual storage system [leastauthority.com] was heartbleed vulnerable, and it took them over a week [github.com] to fix it.
Disclaimer: I'm a paying customer of Spideroak. I make a point of changing my password through the application, then never even logging in to the website again, and dealing with them only through email. This way all the encryption/decryption is done client-side.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:54PM
Not just companies. I swapped from an American email host to neomailbox.com, and I'm American.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @04:49PM
If he had been more into Star Wars instead of Star Trek, [theguardian.com] maybe General Keith Alexander would have known that, "The more you tighten your grip, the more computer systems will slip through your fingers."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:03PM
"announced [...] that the company won a contract from the French government to supply 900,000 users of an inter-ministry network with secure Internet and intranet connections[..]."
They're going to install some source-code viewable Operating System?
..and BITE!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 25 2014, @02:02AM
The French is in bed with US TLA anyway..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gringer on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:34PM
Now there's clear evidence that Snowden's releases are damaging the US. He must be stopped; this release of important information about unlawful espionage is cutting heavily into the profits of large US multinational companies everywhere.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by clone141166 on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:08AM
Oh no! The national security thing was a bit annoying, but now that's he's hurting the bottom line of our campaign contributors WE MUST ACT IMMEDIATELY! *Places nuclear arsenal on standby*
I wrote this comment with sarcastic intent, but I wonder just how far from the truth it really is.
(Score: 2) by monster on Wednesday June 25 2014, @06:56AM
I thought the most damaging acts were the mass data-grabbing themselves. Your line of thought seem to be like it's ok for your wife to cheat on you as long as nobody is told, but once it happens it's entirely the snitch's fault.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:50AM
Good! Bravo! They deserve to lose $35 billion for rolling over like a bunch of spineless pussies when the government came knocking for warrantless searches. They should have spent $500 million to hire every lobbyist, lawyer, and politician in DC to fight the Whitehouse tooth and nail and bring the NSA to its knees. They should have had the foresight to realize what so many of us realized back then, that if the government gained these powers by fiat that it, not Al Qaeda or any other bogeyman, would become our greatest enemy and threat to our freedom. But they were greedy, and arrogant to think that all of us were too stupid to find out or faint of heart to do anything about it. Now customers are abandoning them and their "secure" products in droves and now, only now, are they waking up to the damage it can do to your own pocketbook when you sell out freedom and your customers' trust. I say, cry me a river!
Let them shudder with dread at what they have wrought. And let them pass those shudders of dread upstream to DC and every traitor in that town who thinks it's cool to wipe their ass with our Constitution. I have been saving a very fine case of whiskey to drink with my friends while we sit on the hills overlooking the Potomac and watch that place burn.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by AndyCanfield on Wednesday June 25 2014, @07:42AM
Anybody who opens a web site in the Untied States is an idiot. Anybody who buys networking hardware made in the United States is an idiot.
Stupid Solyent bitches about "USA + NSA" as a subject:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: PLEASE DON'T USE SO MANY CAPS. USING CAPS IS LIKE YELLING!
So I lower-cased the acronyms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:23PM
Err ... where again is Soylent News hosted?
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday June 25 2014, @08:36AM
I don't like this French government source. He should have said "It's a very good thing for European companies. Thank you, NSA." Instead, by saying "Thank you, Snowden.", s/he has just handed a nice quote to the anti-Snowden (pro- mass surveillance) crowd in the USA.
Don't shoot the messenger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:09PM
Well, it IS the French. They'd be perfectly happy being forced to suck a giant cock, so long as no one as no one pointed it out.
(Score: 1) by panachocala on Wednesday June 25 2014, @09:25AM
First, the spying on foreign companies was presumably very profitable for USA.
Second, way to go blaming the messenger.