The problem every business has with the NSA

[MRK]

All of my business is done online. 100% of it. I have 4 different sources of income. They're literally all I do, the only way I know how to actually make money in this economy.

The problem?

Roller-chair jockeys at the NSA have access to all of my proprietary business information. What is to stop them from reading the details of every customer I have, every transaction I make, and absconding with my business plans and copy-paste replicating my trade secrets? Absolutely nothing.

This is so ridiculous I can't even put it into words. This is completely anti-business for one of the only growing economies left out there. There's literally no reason for me to stay in this country and subject myself to this when I could have a higher standard of living elsewhere, paying less taxes, and no stealing of proprietary business information.

[The Northbreather]

Thats what I said to my brother yesterday.

"don't discuss anymore good ideas on the phone or email for some lackey at the NSA to steal and profit from, I mean what the hell are we talking about here?"

[MRK]

This is a direct liability for small businesses and anyone who wants to have class mobility. Its castration of the American Dream.

Any Fortune 500 company with 2,000 employees would not be drastically affected by this, because most of their business plans are out in the open anyway. But one-man or 20-person shops are different. They're able to profit because they are uniquely fulfilling their niche and they are the first innovators on the scene in that niche market. They took a big risk entering into it and spent a lot of effort developing that first profit model. If the entire blueprint of their operations were all laid out bare to see, they would get crushed by competition within weeks.

What I do is not particularly complicated, but it takes a lot of time planning and developing. If my outgoing data between my servers was sniffed, you could easily build a blueprint of all my proprietary code. It would literally be like copy and pasting my business model and its operations. The implications of this are absurd.

In the "olden days," if you had an auditor audit your stuff, yeah it was intrusive, yeah it was a pain in the ass, and yeah it was a proprietary information liability. Or maybe you had a regulator come by and do the same thing. But you at least had a reasonable chance of not everything being stolen, if only because they couldn't access most everything. This NSA stuff on the other hand is like the Dresden firebombing of proprietary secrets when it comes to my industry. They know every contact and transaction I make - recorded by default.

What could go wrong?

[Anti Federalist]

What the hell are you bitchin' about?

Can't hear a word yer' saying...

All this freedom has my ears ringing.

*burp*

[DamianTV]

Two ways to get rid of competition:

#1 Outlaw Competition
#2 Take their Trade Secrets as your own

NSA does both.