NSA able to compromise Cisco, Juniper, Huawei switches

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu)]

On Wed, 01 Jan 2014 11:55:37 +0200, Saku Ytti said:
> Is this legal? Can NSA walk in to US based company and legally coerce to
> install such backdoor?

Well, legal or not... we will probably never know exactly what was said, but
apparently the NSA was able to convince/coerce many of the 800 pound telecom
gorillas to install taps and backdoors at the server end.

> If not, what is the incentive for private company to cooperate?

The same incentive that was used to enforce secrecy on National Security
Letters for many years - play nice or you'll end up in an oublette, with
a trial to (maybe) be held behind closed doors, where you won't see any
of the evidence against you because it's classified.

Remember, the US sprouted this "indefinite detention" concept a while back, and
still hasn't backtracked on it, because of its enormous usefulness as a
cudgel to deal with "enemies of the State".
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