The other side of it is the lost trust in American tech. That’s most prominent in the military debates around whether other countries can rely on their expensive hardware working if they run afoul of American policy, or if the president is looking for leverage to extort a mineral deal, but it’s also highly relevant for the civilian side. For pretty much as long as we’ve had computers, most other countries have trusted hardware made by American companies running operating systems and applications made by American companies. Now everyone has to wonder what kind of espionage or sabotage would be possible if those companies were pressured – or whether the guys standing on stage would even need to be pressured. Suddenly, giving Google the ability to push code onto most of the devices in the world looks less like a security win and more like a risk - and it’s famously hard to establish trust without the rule of law as the foundation. Snowden started it but most allied governments were confident that there were limits in a way which is a lot harder to believe now.
I am expecting that 2024 will be seen as the peak for American tech companies: the longer this goes on, the more competition they’ll have with advantages they can’t match in foreign markets – especially if many of the immigrants who worked at those companies decide to start companies after leaving.
I think since the Snowden revelations it’s pretty clear there is no holds barred in terms of intelligence overreach from practically every angle and state.
What’s happening now, with the tariffs, is really wild (but ultra dumb imho) territory…
Snowden showed that they were willing to compromise allies, but there was still some idea that it was at least plausibly legitimate targets.
Now people are worried that economic espionage or even sabotage are possible. For example, if you are the government of Canada, Snowden annoyed you but you weren’t asking whether Microsoft Update would brick every computer in your government right before a military assault. You probably aren’t thinking that’s highly likely now, either, but you have some intelligence officers analyzing it seriously in a way which would have seemed paranoid a decade ago.
I am expecting that 2024 will be seen as the peak for American tech companies: the longer this goes on, the more competition they’ll have with advantages they can’t match in foreign markets – especially if many of the immigrants who worked at those companies decide to start companies after leaving.