Ride the Lightning

NSA Implanting Backdoors in U.S. Tech Sent to Foreign Markets

June 9, 2014

Well, well, well. Remember when we were so agitated over our claims that Chinese companies (including ZTE and Hyawei) were inserting backdoors into Chinese technology sent to America? It appears, according to a story in The Guardian reported by BGR, that the NSA has been doing precisely the same thing.

The NSA has allegedly been tampering with American made electronic equipment including servers, routers and other network devices that are exported to foreign markets in order to insert backdoor surveillance malware, which can be later activated to spy on networks.

“The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on,” The Guardian writes. “The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The [NSA leaked] document gleefully observes that some “SIGINT [short for signal intelligence] tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)”.” Apparently, someone in the NSA imagines themselves witty.

The leaked documents are (of course) from Edward Snowden and detail such operations dating back to June 2010.

I particularly liked and agreed with this quote from the story:

“Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the motives behind the U.S. government’s claims that Chinese devices cannot be trusted,” The Guardian notes. “But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA’s own reach. In other words, Chinese routers and servers represent not only economic competition but also surveillance competition.”

NSA has neither confirmed nor denied such practices. It puts me in mind of the common child cry, "But Mom, everyone's doing it!"

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