If there's been one consistent theme running through the revelations provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, it's that the gulf between what the U.S. says on the global stage and what it does in practice is anywhere from huge to cavernous. None of this is particularly troubling in and of itself -- hypocrisy is par for this particular course. But we are now likely to see some material blowback from America's hypocrisy.
That's because the most recent tranche of revelations catches America doing something it has very vocally accused China of doing: exploiting networking gear with malware and surveillance technology before it is sold to customers around the world. The U.S. Congress kicked up a huge stink about the Chinese network manufacturer Huawei, which they ultimately blocked from doing business in the U.S. on the premise that the Chinese government was seeding Huawei hardware with surveillance bugs (something, incidentally, the U.S. had good reason to suspect they were doing). Now, though, the U.S. has been exposed as doing just that to its own networking firms.
As Wired's Cade Metz notes, it may be a technically different process. In the U.S. case, the NSA evidently commandeers this hardware without the manufacturer's knowledge and plants its malware, whereas it's assumed that Chinese officials are more directly in bed with their networking companies. But the end result, as Metz writes, is exactly identical. U.S. firms, like Cisco and Juniper, are now every bit as suspect when they do business abroad as Huawei. They may face the same import bans as countries like India and Brazil (understandably) look to throw up more sand in Uncle Sam's prying eyes.
Industrial espionage is typically designed to enhance a country's economic position. But the exposure of such espionage may deal a serious blow to the economic fortunes of U.S. tech firms (one study noted that U.S. cloud companies may stand to lose $35 billion after the Snowden revelations). It may also fracture the global nature of the Internet itself.
