Hot on the heels of disclosure of NSA-TAO bugging US made IT infrastructure equipment in Glenn Greewald's book, No Place to Hide, Cisco CEO John Chambers has sent a letter to President Obama requesting him to reign-in NSA interdiction and hacking, which is harming the US IT industry by eroding trust in US technology and business ethics. The long suspected but previously denied interdictions by NSA were reported by Ars Technica May 15 in Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant, with NSA slides showing technicians in a clandestine TAO workshop installing beacons and Boot ROM malware in a clearly identified Cisco router. Such beacons and malware enable NSA to gain unrestricted access to IT systems and transmit information back for storage and analysis. Chamber's letter, first reported by the Financial Times (paywalled) has now surfaced in the general news media and can be found as an embedded PDF in this story by re/code. As summarized by Reuters:
Cisco chief urges Obama to curb NSA surveillance activity (Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc's chief executive officer has written a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to curtail government surveillance after evidence circulated showing the National Security Agency had intercepted Cisco equipment, a company spokesman said on Sunday. In a letter dated May 15, John Chambers, chief executive officer and chairman of the networking equipment giant, warned of an erosion of confidence in the U.S. technology industry and called for new "standards of conduct" in how the NSA conducts its surveillance. "We simply cannot operate this way, our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security," Chambers said in the letter. [ ... ]
The letter follows a blog post May 13 by Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler, Internet Security Necessary for Global Technology Economy, where Chandler elaborated Cisco's perspective that government over-reach on security is harming the internet and toxic for the industry, including quoting IBM General Counsel Bruce Weber's commentary on IBM's site. Rather than quoting these documents extensively, I suggest you hit the links, read the articles and documents and decide for yourself: • Is this going too far? • What useful purpose does this serve? • Can the American IT industry afford this? Feel free to comment.
Facts in Evidence
[original photos now dead links can be found here ]
Photo: NSA-TAO/Ars Technica
Background Information
30C3: To Protect And Infect Part 1 - The militarization of the InternetYouTube Video Spyware for sale
[ edited 2021.02.15 to clean-up now dead links form original story ]