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Glenn Greenwald: How the NSA Tampers With US Made Internet Routers
Bob9113 (14996) writes "According to Glenn Greenwald, reporting in The Guardian: 'A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal, and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft is very hands-on (literally!)".'"
Just wait till the markets open tomorrow. NASDAQ down 600-800 points (at least). Nobody sane is going to purchase US-made networking gear for a very long time.
Nah, this won't budge the markets, mainly because this info was released some time ago - and it wasn't limited to router hardware.
The only reason this is being re-reported is to promote Greenwalds's book.
You can't trust open source either.
Devices like these often have "binary blobs" that aren't open source
No, you CAN trust open source. If it has a binary blob, then by definition, it is not open source.
it would be naive to assume that the NSA can't hire programmers to contribute to these projects and that they can't be good enough at what they do to make a backdoors that would pass a code review without being detected.
That's still better than closed-source code that you can never inspect. Also, any such contributions will be recorded and tracked. Serious open-source projects like the Linux kernel don't accept anonymous contributions; they have to be signed off by someone. Also importantly, if you look at the Linux kernel, you'll find most contributions (esp. in an area where a backdoor could have a real impact, not places like USB joystick drivers or whatever) come from programmers working for well-known companies, not from random people on the internet.
Does it really matter who we vote for, as far as the NSA is concerned? Any "electable" candidate will just let the NSA keep doing what they're doing.
Even if someone like Al Franken got elected president by some miracle (which is not going to happen) he still couldn't do much unless people also elected a whole bunch of Al Frankens/Rand Pauls to Congress. And that just isn't going to happen (there's a reason why those two are such outliers).
Ultimately the only way we'll ever end NSA malfeseanse (or CIA malfeseanse for that matter) is if we can somehow expose what they do. Without that, we'll change politcians but they'll stay the same.
The NSA's own internal watchdog group found that NSA snooping power was used to spy on 'love interests' of several NSA employees.
If their own internal watchdog group is telling the world that there's something going on here, it's a bold move to claim "all the disclosures released so far have shown government ACTIVELY protecting civil liberties of Americans"
Imagine if an organization such as the ACLU had access to all internal NSA snooping records. Are you telling me that you believe that no civil liberties have been violated by the NSA? Alternatively, are you telling me that we have zero rights because the NSA is allowed to spy on everyone doing anything at any time for no reason at all?
Exposing is not the issue. They need to be convicted. They already HAVE been exposed.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.