> BTW, if you run a company outside of America you'd be crazy to rely on Google since the US could be reading your emails for corporate espionage purposes.
The US could be spying on activities, including email transmissions, that happen wholly outside of the US, as well.
The only reason PRISM, et al., are newsworthy is that there are expectations and widely-perceived legal/constitutional limitations of US government domestic surveillance that don't exist for foreign surveillance.
If my company is outside the US I can try to use infrastructure that at least makes it harder for the US to gain access. If, for example, the US is spying on European allies' infrastructure it would be a diplomatically damaging revelation and the European governments would try to fight it off. If I use a Silicon Valley service I know for a fact that the US can read my data at will without any recourse on my part.
It makes no sense to use Google which is why I'm saying this is threatening to Silicon Valley. Think of it this way, do you think a Chinese email service could become trusted enough to become globally competitive?
> If my company is outside the US I can try to use infrastructure that at least makes it harder for the US to gain access.
Which is great, if you have a decent idea of the NSA's (and the US intelligence establishment in general) capabilities. If not, you're essentially fumbling around in the dark trying to make that kind of infrastructure selection. (And, of course, the US intelligence community isn't the only threat, China -- through whom much traffic that neither originates in nor terminates in China is routed -- has to be a consideration, particularly, but they aren't the only other threat, either.)
If you don't have a system where you have strong theoretical guarantees of end-to-end security and integrity with the data sent over untrusted infrastructure, its security against any of the major threats really relies more than anything on them just not caring about it, and if you think that you are meaningfully buying security by choosing between Google or one of their competitors for basic services, you are probably deluding yourself.
Well in that case, these latest revelations just serve as a reminder to everyone that they shouldn't be using cloud services at all. And that's a threat to Silicon Valley.
The US could be spying on activities, including email transmissions, that happen wholly outside of the US, as well.
The only reason PRISM, et al., are newsworthy is that there are expectations and widely-perceived legal/constitutional limitations of US government domestic surveillance that don't exist for foreign surveillance.