Of particular interest to CSPs is that last step. According to news reports, executives from AT&T, Apple and other large firms met with President Obama the day before his press conference to discuss privacy and surveillance, with future meetings already on the calendar.

Carl Howe, VP of consumer research for Yankee Group, commented on the nature of these meetings on the company’s website. “These types of discussions about national security interests are not technical meetings, but rather attempts to build private consensus around government policy initiatives,” he wrote. “With the Snowden affair, privacy and surveillance has turned into a hot-button public relations issue for the White House. The open question is whether they can do anything substantive to improve privacy or whether this is simply window-dressing to gain corporate support for existing surveillance programs.”

Effect on the market

Now that the veil of secrecy has been removed, companies are thinking twice about how Big Data is managed and stored as well as the overall security of their communications. It’s beginning to have a dramatic effect: according to Bloomberg, Cisco may experience a backlash in China, where it sells more than $2 billion worth of network gear each year, because of the fallout over Snowden’s accusations; rivals Huawei and ZTE are all but sure to jump on the news.

Some companies have actually gone out of business since June, such as Lavabit, which terminated its encrypted email service rather than cooperate with the NSA. Other companies that offer advanced encryption solutions and privacy protection services, however, have experienced an increase in business—DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t record users’ search histories, reported that its traffic surged 75 percent in the two weeks following the first reports of PRISM, and SafeMonk supplies an encryption service for Dropbox that it claims is “tapproof”—while some have changed their security protocols, including Wikipedia, which announced plans to move to a secure server in light of the NSA’s espionage.

Commercially available products

Deep-packet inspection (DPI) probes from companies like NetScout, QOSMOS and others enable all traffic packets to be routed to a third-party appliance. In other words, the same devices used to pull information for Big Data solutions are also used for forensic analysis and government surveillance. However, it’s important to point out that these solutions weren’t developed to enable espionage, but created in order to improve network reliability, marketing, customer insight, and customer experience.

We are living in a brave new world

If Edward Snowden’s story has taught us anything, it’s ultimately that any form of communication in the digital realm can be intercepted, parsed and cataloged if the network from which it originates isn’t wholly private and encryption isn’t 256-bit or higher. The existence of a federal Big Data factory will likely usher in a new era of supersecure and/or private communications service offerings. It will also impact the business opportunities of those in Big Data, search indexing and network equipment manufacturing. CSPs should continue to push for greater government transparency and customer dialogue surrounding their data-gathering efforts while investigating new opportunities prompted by the NSA scandal.