SAN FRANCISCO: Edward Snowden’s unprecedented exposure of US technology companies’ close collaboration with national intelligence agencies, widely expected to damage the industry’s financial performance abroad, may actually end up helping.

Despite emphatic predictions of waning business prospects, some of the big Internet companies that the former National Security Agency contractor showed to be closely involved in gathering data on people overseas—such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.—say privately that they have felt little if any impact on their businesses.

Insiders at companies that offer remote computing services known as cloud computing, including Amazon and Microsoft Corp, also say they are seeing no fallout.

Meanwhile, smaller US companies offering encryption and related security services are seeing a jump in business overseas, along with an uptick in sales domestically as individuals and companies work harder to protect secrets.

“Our value proposition had been that it’s a wild world out there, while doing business internationally you need to protect yourself,” said Jon Callas, co-founder of phone and text encryption provider Silent Circle, where revenue quadrupled from May to June on a small base.

“Now the message people are getting from the newspapers every day is that it’s a wild world even domestically.”

PROPHESIES OF DOOM: Shortly after Snowden’s leaked documents detailed collaboration giving the NSA access to the accounts of tens of thousands of net companies’ users, the big Internet companies and their allies issued dire warnings, predicting that American businesses would lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue abroad as distrustful customers seek out local alternatives.

In a federal court filing last week, Google said that still-unfolding news coverage was causing “substantial harm to Google’s reputation and business”. The company said that could be mitigated if it were allowed to comment with precision about its intelligence dealings.

Likewise, last month, six technology trade groups wrote to the White House to urge reforms in the spy programmes, citing what it called a “study” predicting a $35 billion cumulative shortfall by 2016 in the vital economic sector.

That number, it turns out, was extrapolated from a security trade group’s survey of 207 non-US members—and the group, the Cloud Security Alliance, had explicitly cautioned that its members weren’t representative of the entire industry. “I know you want sectors and numbers, but I don’t have it,” said Ed Black, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, one of the trade groups behind the letter.

“Anybody who tells you they do is making it up.”

The trade groups aren’t the only ones issuing dismal, and headline-grabbing, forecasts.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten wrote of the $35 billion figure: “We think this estimate is too low and could be as high as $180 billion, or a 25 percent hit to overall IT [information technology] service provider revenues.”—Reuters