Spying from the national security Agency of USA is causing serious damage to the national economy, undermining the trust of citizens as to U.S. technological corporations, which the surveillance is costing tens of billions of dollars, and to the state as a whole. However, there is another negative consequence is the loss of productivity.
Among professionals in the field of IT-security, it is widely known that any kind of cyber attacks by individual hackers lead to lower productivity devices and, as a consequence, the work of employees. Apparently, the same thing happens in the case when a break-in are not individuals, and public service.
In particular, the leading computer and Internet experts say that NSA weakens the functionality of our computers and the Internet, deliberately reducing the degree of protection, for example-creating backdoors through which hackers can gain access to personal information of users. In the process of conflict between “local” and “foreign” programs our devices spend most of their system resources, as a result, we are unable to do the job faster.
It is noteworthy that American and British intelligence agencies engaged in the deliberate weakening of technological security for the past many decades and with time it only gets worse. For example, we know that their plans include the use of programs to automatically infecting millions of computers.
Intelligence organizations have long collected millions of images from web cameras on our computers, and in accordance with the documents declassified by Edward Snowden us and British intelligence agencies have carried out cyber attacks on the computer network so-called “hacktivists”, as well as monitoring of the supporters of groups such as Wikileaks.
Given that intelligence agencies are spying on everyone, collecting millions of screenshots, intercepting laptop shipments by creating fake versions of popular websites to infect computers with malware, carrying out cyber attacks on those they don’t like, not without reason to assume that each of us in varying degrees is faced with the negative consequences of the operating activities of the spy agencies.
Bill Binnie, one of the leaders of high rank and senior technical Director at the NSA, spent 32 years there and became during this time, a legend for thousands of other employees of the Agency, which created a program for mass surveillance of digital information, writes to Washington’s Blog:
“There are several types of costs related to espionage. First, it is such costs that arise as a result of the fact that neither the government nor business can not be sure what consequences will come if they are exposed, which ultimately translates into sales.
Other costs associated with the necessity of weakening systems (operating systems, firewalls, encryption), resulting in user data more accessible for cyber criminals and government alike.
All of these costs are difficult to quantify. For example, we know about the hackers, again and again receiving user data. Is this a result of the activities of the civil service? Or what about all the attacks on government information system? If they’re connected with debility of the system?
To summarize, we can say that if we (including our government) will not be able to correct the flaws in these systems then we all lose”.
