NSA is accused of sneaking backdoors into hardware exports (via The Inquirer)
Glenn Greenwald has accused the US National Security Agency (NSA) of inserting backdoors for surveillance purposes into servers being exported to other countries. The irony here is that this is just the sort of thing that the US government has in the…
This post was republished using Repost. Please read it on Informed Comment directly: https://www.juancole.com/2014/05/greenwald-backdoors-hardware.html
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The New America Foundation: “Briefing on the Technological Impact of NSA Surveillance”
been doing so for 20 yrs
Well, now you can understand why the government wants to keep this a secret – it’s going to cut the legs out from under US computer and networking vendors, now that it’s become public. Who wants an NSA-configured Cisco router?
Just as the NSA tapping “the Cloud” storage and American ISPs has caused other countries to start building up their own ‘Net infrastructure, so as to bypass the US. Ditto for deliberately laming the encryption technology that is critical for building trust in computer networks. And let’s not forget Heartbleed.
This kind of scorched earth, damn the consequences, any means justify our ends attitude by American “intelligence” agencies has been coming back to bite the US for decades now. Like global warming, regardless of what we do now, we’ll be living with the consequences of this for decades to come. Might as well start cleaning house NOW.
Didja know Dianne Feinstein’s family has interest in a company that makes the tools to put backdoors in chipsets?
Caution! I have some select crude words (also very brief) for the ‘elected’ senator from my state, and an interesting note on the cyber-stalking of anyone who researches thing like this. The image at the top of this post and text elaborate with documentation.
Also, and more on-topic, on October 01, 2013 Glenn Greenwald was @reddit discussing Snowden’s revelations about the federal government’s chip tampering. There were some electrical engineers watching, and ‘debugging’ the thread.
Some interesting conclusions about which chips are compromised, and it’s an extensive list.
I speculated humorously at the time that most of them ended up in internet ‘privacy appliances’. Dedicated boxes for communicating with paid-for consumer VPN and proxy services now being advertised in the National Enquirer etc, but well hell, “Export” is just as cynically humorous.
Note: All links lead to my Tumblr b/c: Simplicity (and synopsis)