Insider Threat Special Report: Snowden’s Impact on Business, Government

By Steven Bay

Steven Bay left Booz Allen Hamilton earlier this year after nine years with the management consulting firm.  He joined BAH in 2007 to work on a contract for the National Security Agency, and in 2011 was transferred to Hawaii to run its local NSA team.  Bay started his career in the Air Force as a Persian Farsi linguist.  He was stationed at Ft. Meade, Maryland where he translated Persian documents and later became a digital network intelligence analyst.  He has launched a cyber consulting firm at ssbaygroup.com.

The impact that the Snowden revelations had on private businesses is one of the most overlooked stories in the Snowden saga, particularly the impact on technology and Internet communications companies such as Apple, Google, Verizon, and Cisco.  In my opinion, the Snowden revelations impacted businesses’ willingness to work with the government and the trust foreign countries have in the products and services these companies offer.

The first Snowden leak revealed the National Security Agency’s Prism program.  According to published reports, this program provided the NSA with direct access to data gathered and used by U.S. based Internet companies.  While the report does not confirm whether these companies willingly cooperated with the NSA, the implication is that any data users put into those systems may have been available to the National Security Agency and the larger American intelligence apparatus.  Understandably, revelations such as this shake customer confidence; not only the confidence of Americans but people across the world. 

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

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