Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers

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  1. reedak

    reedak Well-Known Member

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    1. Glenn Greenwald is a former columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian. An ex-constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon. His most recent book is about the US surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning.

    For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. Along with Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for the Guardian was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

    2. The following are excerpts from Glenn Greenwald's 12 May 2014 article headlined "Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers".

    (Begin excerpts)
    For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the US accused the Chinese of doing.

    The drumbeat of American accusations against Chinese internet device manufacturers was unrelenting....

    But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. 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!)".

    Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: "In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."... (End excerpts)

    Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...nwald-nsa-tampers-us-internet-routers-snowden
     

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