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It’s because of money.

When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA and provided hard evidence to the public that suspicions of being secretly monitored were true, it caused the willing partners of the NSA to begin worrying about their bottom line. The tech companies were worried, but they were still willing to cooperate.

The rumors of secret data gathering of our private correspondence through captured phone conversations, emails, texts, and other metadata methods were proved true and most of the population took notice, despite a concerted effort by the government to discredit and paint Eric Snowden as a traitor.

Since the beginning of the NSA scandal, US businesses have expressed concern over the potential blowback of the revelations on their bottom lines.

It’s only recently, fearing foreign governments and other firms will no longer trust them to provide secure products and services, they’ve pushed back against the government, demanding more transparency of how the intelligence community operates.

Verizon is one of the first companies that can point to the NSA as a direct cause for a failed business deal. The Interior Ministry released a statement Thursday, saying “the ties revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms in the wake of the U.S. National Security Agency affair show that the German government needs a very high level of security for its critical networks.”

Although it was the first company outed by journalist Glenn Greenwald and British newspaper the Guardian as providing the NSA with millions of instances of metadata on a daily basis, Verizon is not the only – or necessarily the first – to do so.

As far back as 2001, the NSA reportedly collected data from AT&T by re-routing information on its network to government computers. Reporting by Wired revealed documents from AT&T technician Mark Klein showing how the feat was accomplished using hardware in a now famous secret room at the company’s San Francisco data center.

Though the US and Germany are allies, documents released over the past year by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed an American intelligence community with access to a wide variety of German communications. The fallout has been a chilling of relations between the two nations, with the Bundestag (German parliament) especially fierce in its criticisms and demands for answers from the US.

To the consternation of American officials hoping to prosecute Snowden for espionage, the German parliament even invited the leaker to testify about the NSA’s practices in a formal hearing.

Not Just The Cell Phone Companies

Microsoft finds itself resisting a US-issued warrant to turn over email data stored in Dublin, Ireland, which belongs to a European customer. The company has appealed the decision and strongly criticized the intentions of the government, marking one of multiple occasions on which the software giant has expressed displeasure over the NSA’s surveillance practices.

“The government takes the extraordinary position that by merely serving such a warrant on any US-based email provider, it has the right to obtain the private emails of any subscriber, no matter where in the world the data may be located, and without the knowledge or consent of the subscriber or the relevant foreign government where the data is stored,” Microsoft argued in court papers earlier this month.

Although Microsoft has been vocal in its opposition to the NSA over the past year or so – it, along with Google, Yahoo and Facebook have also filed legal challenges against the gag orders placed on their ability to discuss government data requests – the company did initially cooperate with intelligence agencies.

As documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, Microsoft not only helped the NSA bypass its own encryption on services like Outlook and Hotmail, the company also helped the agency easily collect video calls through Skype and other data through SkyDrive.

Regarding its own cooperation with NSA, Smith said what’s more concerning is that the government is collecting data through them without asking for permission.

“We knew what we were being asked to do,” he said, according to the Journal. “We didn’t know what was being done without our knowledge, and we still do not know all of that even today.”