Bruce Schneier has an excellent article in The Atlantic entitled The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet. This is a great read and I urge you to take a look if you haven’t already.
The title is a little misleading, however. The article is really a strongly worded exhortation for tech firms to start fighting for their users. If they don’t, Schneier says, they will lose those users. Schneier tells them not to depend on the NSA protecting them, “The NSA doesn’t care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it’s convenient to do so.” As evidence for that he points to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others who are already seeing customers fleeing and who are pleading with the government to let them explain what they’ve been required to do and what information they’ve turned over but the government has refused. They don’t care about you or your problems Schneier tells them.
He tells other tech companies that haven’t yet been outed (or approached by the government) that the NSA will tell them that their participation will remain forever secret but their names will inevitably find their way onto internal documents that Snowden or some future leaker will make public.
The only alternative to fighting the government when it comes calling with its secret warrants is to break faith with your users. Do that, and when those users find out they will never trust you again and will start looking for someone else to do business with.
Again, this is a great article. Read it.
Update: say → says