Trustworthy Software For The NSA?

Janus Daniels writes "There's a new story from the New York Times, as reprinted at CNET News, about security concerns for Government agencies buying software from overseas. According to the article, a whistle-blower who helped sell software to the National Security Agency says that much of the development work is subcontracted to China, raising serious national security risks. He also discovered in the sales-support database... the names of more than 30 [identity-classified] employees of the United States National Security Agency...'"

Comments

chinese intelligence

[lurgyman]

And obviously Chinese intel has capitalized on this - succesfully directing the US Air Force to it's embassy during the Serbian fiasco a few years back...

Outsiders

[mjihad]

Obviously, having all software written in the US eliminates the risk of having security risks.

What suits them best.

[The Old Burke]

NSA is so importsnat that they should be allowed to use whatever software solutions they have to.

China is free democratic and trustworty country with a growing group software developers.I'm sure that they could make something secure for NSA that we could lay our nations hands in. It's extremly important that we help to foster proprietary solutions that will help bussiness abroad.

And after all its much better to use secure and trusted solutios from a close ally than having to resort to some of those old versions of UNIX. Know that SCO probably wins their case and AIX and Solaris goes down the drain, it could be nice to have some other alternatives than only american software. Because we all know, as DARPA found out, that you just can't trust FreeBSD and Linux in an environment like the NSA needs.

don't buy skynet!!

[slyguy420]

whatever you do, don't buy that fancy new software from skynet!! /ahnuld accent on "Trust Me" /off

Uh. Wow.

[Elwood P Dowd]

I know someone that has a small software company that's done contract work for the CIA. He is much, much more careful with his software than that, and would never make a mistake like that because he'd be afraid that he'd lose his security clearance and never be able to get his cushy government contracts.

He also said that he worked for a certain salad dressing company once, and they were much more careful about their trade secrets (recepies) than the CIA was about anything.