[conspire] (forw) Re: Chicago Tribune - EXCLUSIVE-Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

[Rick Moen]

Schneier's blog covers these matters pretty well.
https://www.schneier.com

(The acronym 'RSADSI' means RSA Data Security, Inc., now a division of
EMC.  Among other things, RSADSI offers to other appliance and software 
makers a crypto toolkit called 'Bsafe' that is now known to have been
deliberately crippled with a weak random number generator at the behest
of NSA.  So, the damage reaches much more widely than RSADSI itself,
because of very widespread third-party usage.)

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 21:45:22 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Jesse Monroy <jesse650 at gmail.com>
Cc: "john. sokol" <john.sokol at gmail.com>,
	Steve Tymon <demonwryter at gmail.com>,
	Leveious Roland <leveious at gmail.com>,
	bill crawford <w.w.crawford at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Chicago Tribune - EXCLUSIVE-Secret contract tied NSA and
	security industry pioneer
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Jesse Monroy (jesse650 at gmail.com):

> http://my.chicagotribune.com/#story/sns-rt-usa-securityrsa-exclusive-pix-20131220/

That's pretty explosive.  The story actually originated with Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220
Notice that RSADSI denies (non-credibly) the claims, just as AT&T
non-credibly denies that NSA directly taps AT&T trunk lines.

https://blogs.rsa.com/news-media-2/rsa-response/
  RSADSI's clumsy lies was unsigned, thus no specific executive was
  obliged to brazenly fib in public.
http://business.time.com/2013/12/20/att-transparency-report/
  AT&T's clumsy lie was voiced by AT&T Senior Executive Vice President
and General Counsel Wayne Watts

However, the _most_ explosive revelation I've seen yet is _Der Spiegel's_ 
expose of NSA's black-hat unit, which:

o  routinely back-doors industry-standard firmware code
o  divert computer shipments to one of their offices to be 
   trojaned before delivery to customers.
o  completely owns any iPhone
o  has completely standardised backdoors for hardware from Cisco,
Juniper Networks, Huawei, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful-toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html

The iPhone claim was fleshed out by a recent Jacob Applebaum talk.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/the-nsa-reportedly-has-total-access-to-your-iphone/

On the catalogue of hardware hacks:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/12/leaked-catalog-reveals-nsa-has-backdoors-for-hardware-from-cisco-juniper-networks-and-more/

----- End forwarded message -----