Two years after Snowden, NSA revelations still hurting US tech firms in China: report

Revelations of digital surveillance by American spy agencies could end up costing US firms billions of dollars in lost business and lawmakers in Washington are falling short in their duty to address the issue, a US think tank has said.

Tech firms, in particular, have underperformed in foreign markets following the leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to a paper published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. 

"Our original thought was once policy makers realised this was having an impact on business interests, they would take more aggressive action to address the concerns," Daniel Castro, ITIF vice president, told the South China Morning Post. He helped author the report.

The ITIF predicted in 2013 that "even a modest drop" in the foreign market share for cloud computing could cost the US economy up to US$35 billion by 2016. 

That now looks like a conservative estimate as the revelations of cyber-snooping have negatively affected “the whole US tech industry,” the report said.

Cloud computing firms and data centres have been some of the worst hit, with foreign companies choosing to avoid storing their data in the US following revelations about the NSA's digital surveillance programmes.