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How the NSA Is Harming America's Economy
anagama writes "According to an article at Medium, 'Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. ... Cisco saw orders in Brazil drop 25% and Russia drop 30%. ... Analysts had expected Cisco's business in emerging markets to increase 6%, but instead it dropped 12%, sending shares of Cisco plunging 10% in after-hours trading.' This is in addition to the harm caused to remote services that may cost $35 billion over the next three years. Then, of course, there are the ways the NSA has made ID theft easier. ID theft cost Americans $1.52 billion in 2011, to say nothing of the time wasted in solving ID theft issues — some of that figure is certainly attributable to holes the NSA helped build. The NSA, its policies, and the politicians who support the same are directly responsible for massive losses of money and jobs."
"Cisco’s techniques cut the effective tax rate on its reported international income to about 5 percent since 2008 by moving profits from roughly $20 billion in annual global sales through the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda"
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maybe its time we consider going back to software (oss) based networking gear. it will be much slower than hardware based ones but we can't verify hardware designs like we can software ones.
That software has to run on hardware and if you can't trust the hardware you are screwed anyway, it's like trusting your software (oss) encryption when there's a hardware keylogger installed. Send the right magic numbers and the hardware could start doing anything it wants like mirroring traffic, dumping memory, whatever the attacker needs to completely compromise the box. The only advantage would be that it could run on more generic hardware that you hopefully could buy from a more trusted supplier.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But even if you pop the champagne and throw a party when Cisco is hurt, I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.
> So the particular statement referring to the NSA making identity theft easier is flat out BULLSHIT.
How so? I thought it is pretty much fact. They introduced some weak encryption, and most of all they introduced weak random number generators, which means any key generated using it should be considered compromised. If the NSA can break it, the hackers will learn how to break it, too, especially if there is money behind it.