The NSA Has Been Opening Your Packages!

[Dinner]

(I saw this on another forum and thought I would share it here.)

So they can install spyware!

SPIEGEL published two pieces this morning about the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division, aka premier hacking ninja squad. According to Snowden documents, TAO has a catalog of all the commercial equipment that carries NSA backdoors. And it's a who's who of a list. Storage products from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung have backdoors in their firmware, firewalls from Juniper Networks have been compromised, plus networking equipment from Cisco and Huawei, and even unspecified products from Dell. TAO actually intercepts online orders of these and other electronics to bug them.

SPIEGEL notes that the documents do not provide any evidence that the manufacturers mentioned had any idea about this NSA activity. Every company spokesperson contacted by Spiegel reporters denied having any knowledge of the situation, though Dell officials said instead that the company "respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates."

More at the link, but I think that at this point, the only sensible thing to do is completely shutdown the NSA and bar its employees from ever working for or with the government again.

[Dauphin]

Huawei? That is a rather amusing notion.

[Elok]

Perhaps Huawei just indiscriminately copied the spyware, along with everything else they ripped off from Cisco? Anyway, the hot news a few months back said that the NSA had been deliberately undermining new encryption standards, which is at least as worrisome. This seems a waste of time for CATCHING THE TERRISTS purposes, but doesn't surprise me.

[ZEE]

One-starring Oerdin-Thrades™ is an artform.

[Alexander's Horse]

I had been wondering who had been eating my chocolates

[Aeson]

I had been wondering who had been eating my chocolates

Next time replace the chocolates in your packages with chocolate coated dog excrement. Send it to someone you don't like, just in case it makes it through "customs"

[Sava]

I read that half of all internet traffic is from bots. If the NSA is really monitoring all that, I suspect they are wasting a lot of time and money.

[The Mad Monk]

Did the NSA reset the forum just now? I was abruptly logged out.

[pchang]

I suspect they are wasting a lot of time and money.

I know they are wasting a lot of time and money.