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It has been argued that PRISM was more about corporate espionage under the ruberic of counter-terrorism than anything else. In the book The Shadow Factory, Jame
by mikece 6y ago
It has been argued that PRISM was more about corporate espionage under the ruberic of counter-terrorism than anything else. In the book The Shadow Factory, James Bamford points out the ridiculously low prices that were available for overseas traffic to be routed into the US and then back to a neighboring country, sometimes even a different region of the same country... anything to get overseas telecoms to route traffic through a PRISIM splitter (the allegation Bamford makes is that bribery was involved to get these routing deals in place as well).
It’s certainly a fanciful story but does anyone really doubt that the post 9/11 US government would do this?
- bigbubba 6y ago'Whatever makes the rich richer is what they're doing' is probably a decent first order approximation, and under that logic corporate espionage does seem very likely.
- hammock 6y agoSeems like, in a world where most traffic is encrypted, this could only be worth it if they had a way of decrypting it, no?
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoI am fairly certain that Bamford did not even come close to making the claim that PRISM was more about corporate espionage. If you have a citation that contradicts this, I’d love to see it. Yes, not only do I doubt that the post 9/11 government is spending billions (or even millions) to spy on corporations, but I’d flip your question and ask does anyone really believe that they are doing that. Before someone brings up the Petrobras example, I’ll pre-emptively point out that this isn’t in any way suggestive of what’s alleged above, and it wasn’t related to PRISM.