Will Intelligence Gathering Will Slow Cloud Computing?

It sometimes takes an outsider to tell what is happening "inside" a firm or nation. And one Canadian points out one information technology downside to what users reasonably might conclude are threats to information privacy: namely the threat to U.S.-based cloud computing services, compared to services based elsewhere.

In other words, a resident of Canada, needed to source cloud services there, might now conclude that it cannot buy from Amazon or Google or Verizon or other cloud suppliers because of the increased risk of government data acquisition or even transparency about the level of risk. 

Separately, there also are indications the European Union might now be rethinking what U.S. cloud computing risk might mean elsewhere. 

So some would-be customers will have to add intelligence risk to their decisions about sourcing cloud services. Some might conclude that they simply cannot source cloud computing from U.S. suppliers.

And though some blame Verizon or Google for cooperating with U.S. intelligence probes, some might say the bigger culprits are laws that allow overly-broad data gathering, or government agencies that either overreach, illegally use information to punish political opponents. 

After all, a single citizen or business cannot easily refuse to comply with a "lawful" request for records. Nor can citizens prevent people inside agencies from misusing data for other purposes. 

Beyond that, the issue is whether agencies now have become in some way institutionally corrupted, and whether U.S. citizens have allowed that corruption to happen, directly or indirectly.

The issue of "liberty" and other countervailing trends (legitimate needs to provide protection from terrorism) now pose issues the nation has not resolved. And some would say another complicating factor is the growth of the administrative state. That makes effective citizen control much more difficult.

For perhaps the first time, the next generation of computing architecture (cloud and mobile) now is significantly affected by political concerns. And that potentially is going to slow the growth of cloud computing, unless the political problems are addressed.