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Charles Cooper reports that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has called former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a traitor for leaking national secrets about US surveillance practices and says that foreign nations may use the disclosures as an excuse to promote their domestic technology suppliers over American rivals. "Obviously he's a traitor," says Andreessen. "Like if you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor,' there's a picture of Ed Snowden. Like he's a textbook traitor. They don't get much more traitor than that. I will say that I'm in the distinct minority out here. Most people in Silicon Valley would pick the other designation."
Andreessen added that NSA leaks may well wind up getting used as a cudgel by foreign governments against American companies that depend on overseas sales. "There's a big open question right now how successful our companies will be when they go sell products overseas," says Andreessen. "I think there are a lot of foreign companies that are very envious of Silicon Valley and America's domination of tech and wish that they could implement protection policies. And they are going to use this whole affair as a reason to do that ... as an excuse."
(Score: 1) by quixote on Saturday June 07 2014, @02:29PM
I was around. But I wasn't paying attention. I had no idea.
His whole justification seems to be "ZOMG My companies may sell less stuff."
Pathetic.
(Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Saturday June 07 2014, @02:44PM
I honestly don't remember the specifics, it was so long ago. I just remember getting a very unfavorable impression of the guy during that process - it didn't help that his engineering contribution was very minor. I was completely unsurprised that he went on to become a vulture capitalist.
(Score: 1) by meisterister on Saturday June 07 2014, @06:56PM
>His whole justification seems to be "ZOMG My companies may sell less defective bug-ridden spyware crap."
FTFY.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.