Will PRISM Harm the US Tech Industry→

Imagine if it had come out in the 1980s that Japanese intelligence agencies were tracking the location of every Toyota and Honda vehicle, and then the big response from the Japanese government was to reassure people that Japanese citizens weren’t being spied upon this way. There would have been—legitimately—massive political pressure to get Japanese cars out of foreign markets.

Matt Yglesias has a great blog post puncturing some of the insular, parochial American reactions to the spying scandal.

Very few Americans seem to care about civil liberties or the Bill of Rights, but have we considered how these national security programs could hobble our biggest exports? If you lived in another country and were using products made by US companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., would you be okay with those products feeding your information directly to a foreign government?