This morning, at the Chamber of Commerce’s Global IP Summit, Carlos Gutierrez warned that U.S. companies trying to enforce their copyrights, patents and trademarks in countries like China may have a harder time because NSA surveillance has cost the U.S. its moral credibility. In essence, the obvious response to American companies’ complaints about IP infringement would be: “Ah, but your government does the same thing to our private communications!”

Gutierrez knows something about both government surveillance and expropriation: his family fled Cuba when he was just six after his father’s business was seized by Castro’s communist government. He worked his way up the ranks at Kellogg from sales rep to CEO — the only Latino CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the youngest in Kellogg’s history. He became Secretary of Commerce in 2004, and used his office to champion intellectual property rights as a pillar of capitalism.

So who better to keynote the Chamber of Commerce’s Global IP Summit — and denounce attacks on intellectual property as attacks on the moral underpinnings of freedom? And who better to speak out on the hypocrisy of the U.S. government stealing private data while denouncing the theft of private data by foreign governments and companies?

If anything could unite the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Chamber of Commerce — CopyLeft with CopyRight — it’s standing up to our surveillance state. If more pillars of the business community and prominent Republicans would speak out against U.S. government surveillance, as Gutierrez has done, Congress might actually get serious about reining in the surveillance state, instead of trying to paper over the problem with minor concessions on transparency — while enshrining such surveillance in law.

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