Marc Andreessen: Tech companies are still fuming over the NSA
Almost a year after he released a flurry of documents showing the National Security Agency was collecting data on everyone from foreign leaders to US citizens, Edward Snowden is still the predominant Washington story in the minds of tech executives who believe the controversy has caused damage to their businesses.
That's according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said in a wide-ranging interview that Silicon Valley's repeated meetings with the Obama administration were mostly for show and have produced "not even a little" progress on privacy and surveillance issues. Chief executives from leading companies including Netflix, Google and Facebook met with senior White House officials in December, and again in March. While the Obama Administration said at the time that the meetings helped clear the air on intelligence reforms, Andreessen argued that the White House has not done enough to mitigate the NSA's impact on tech companies' reputations, particularly overseas.
"The level of trust in US companies has been seriously damaged, especially but not exclusively outside the US," said Andreessen. "Every time a new shoe drops -- and there are 10,000 of them -- it serves a blow to the US." Some estimates suggest the news about the NSA's surveillance practices may have cost tech companies tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Marc Andreessen: Tech companies are still fuming over the NSA