‘Unacceptable’: Cisco’s Chambers tells Obama re NSA interceptions

[silicon_toad2000]

http://delimiter.com.au/2014/05/19/unacceptable-ciscos-chambers-tells-obama-re-nsa-interceptions/

Long-time Cisco Systems chief executive John Chambers has written a strongly worded letter to US President Barack Obama stating that the company “simply cannot operate” if the National Security Agency continues intercepting its routers and injecting spyware onto them before they are delivered to customers.

Last week journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has access to the National Security Agency treasure trove of whistleblower Edward Snowden, published an article in The Guardian newspaper which referred to a June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department

The report reportedly baldly states that the 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 report has huge significance for countries outside the US, including Australia, because the US is home to some of the world’s largest network equipment manufacturers — companies such as Cisco Systems, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent (courtesy of its Lucent merger in 2006) and many smaller companies all have substantial US facilities. These same companies supply equipment to Australia’s largest telcos — Telstra, Optus, TPG, iiNet, Vodafone, and of course NBN Co. The Guardian report implies that the NSA may have compromised the security of Australia’s largest telecommunications networks, through networking equipment exported from the US.

[GhostShip]

Undermining the security of a company that supplies a large part of the internet with its connectivity is the dumbest thing that we have seen so far, folks will simply not take the risk of having trojaned equipment and a successful US company will be severely damaged at the whim of some faceless manager at the NSA who are it seems despite having massive amounts of computing power at their disposal unable to compete with modern security mechanisms and so have decided to rig the game in their favour.

One of the golden rules in intelligence work is never to burn your sources, its seems cisco can burn while the folks that ordered this operation sit back in the shadows.