France calls for greater regulation, “to level the playing field in the internet economy and allow the emergence of alternatives in Europe to U.S. Web giants.”
Rest assured that this has nothing to do with the NSA per se. This is a strategic move by France to manipulate regulators so that it (France) might benefit. Absent actually being competitive, France hopes to hobble its enemy via red tape.
Still, some regulators might take this seriously due to (highly legitimate) concerns over privacy. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft can be genuinely privacy-concerned and put high priority of security, but it’s all for naught if the NSA can use absurd national security letters to force these companies to provide on-going backdoor access to their software, or otherwise extract whatever information they want, without obtaining any warrant, about anyone.
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Good essay on why NSA’s cyber sabotage makes us all less safe.
NSA is prioritizing its own foreign intelligence collection goals over the security of the Internet. The agency is gambling that the flaws it is exploiting will never be discovered by other governments’ intelligence services, or by hackers. As Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity czar observed earlier this year, when governments quietly exploit, rather than fix security vulnerabilities “we all fundamentally become less secure.”
Nothing new here, but good points regardless.
t h e j o h n s m i t h b l o g 
Reblogged this on Brittius.com.