Today the government of Germany led by famous NSA phone hacking victim Angela Merkel got sweet revenge. In the country that invented the term “shadenfreude,” Ms. Merkel got to announce that the government contract with American telecom company Verizon to update the government’s phone systems would not be going forward.?The German interior ministry said the cancellation was linked to the ?relationship between foreign intelligence agencies and companies.”
This decision was entirely due to Edward Snowden leaking documents that showed Verizon without any corporate pushback handed over unlimited data on its users. This decision also mirrors the government of Brazil’s recent decision to no longer use, or pay a licensing fee, to Microsoft Outlook and will instead be using a nationally developed secure program stored on their own (Chinese made) servers in Brazil.
These are only two countries, so far, that have publicly announced they are “pulling back” from American businesses due to our uncontrolled spying and illegal mixture of government and business interests. How many more millions, if not billions, will we lose?
In the space of a few months, two multi-million dollar contracts have been lost due to our government not respecting our own founding principle of people being safe and secure in their papers and persons.
Shadenfreude indeed.
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