The Snowden Effect

Jay Rosen, leader of the citizen journalism movement, defines the Snowden Effect as “Direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden’s leaks about the surveillance state in the U.S” (Rosen). The overdue debate on national security and its expansion into cyberspace manifested itself at many notable events and in many notable countries. Most internet cloud companies hosted in the United States; Google, Verizon, AT&T, had to make public statements for the sake of their reputation, addressing their involvement in the NSA’s PRISM program. These statements, coming from such major corporations, cast a wide net and massively contributed to public awareness and perception of the issues. 

 

Not long after, the encrypted email service Snowden used, Lavabit, was shut down after refusing to disclose the encryptions they used to code the content on the site. Had they handed the encryption keys over, the information and addresses of their users would have been decoded and  kept by the government, violating the concept of privacy the site promised to their users.(Tsukayama). As government officials in the U.S, Germany, and Britain realized their personal phones had been tapped, massive boons of government funding crashed into the technology industry, trying to create completely secure phones as quickly as possible (Szoldra). Not only did this effort span many different countries, but also caused other foreign nations to drop contracts with U.S computing companies in favor of ones from their home countries, concerned about potentially secret links to the NSA. This massive drop in foreign business took billions of dollars out of the U.S economy, an effect that still, largely, has not been undone. However, the Snowden Effect did not only plague the U.S, it beset many other nations.