“It was the kind of thing you couldn’t say no to,” one chief executive said to me. “You have a president saying lives are on the line.” But now that chief executive also had to contemplate the dangers of saying yes. After Snowden, the potential cost of cooperating with Washington was a lot higher. Any country that wanted to keep American firms out of their markets could make an easy national-security argument: buy the American equipment, and you were probably buying a “back door” that the NSA installed to tap into those systems.
