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That doesn't make any sense, the operators of Room 641A don't need to backdoor their own gear.
by creato 5y ago
That doesn't make any sense, the operators of Room 641A don't need to backdoor their own gear.
- Scoundreller 5y agoMaybe in exchange for the backdoor they buy a mountain of non-backdoored versions too?
- Zigurd 5y agoThere is an interesting aspect of the room 641a story that could turn out to be different in detail: The Wikipedia article says, as do other accounts, that beam splitters were used to tap into fiber optic lines. That might in fact be how it was done, but I do not think that was necessary. IIRC, Juniper core routers were (uniquely, at the time?) capable of duplicating traffic on a NIC to another NIC without performance impact on capacity as a whole. This would have made them particularly suitable for mass surveillance that would not show up in network management metrics.
- randombits0 5y agoWhen trying to make sense of why things are the way they are, one very successful technique to use is “follow the money”. “We want you to backdoor your product for ‘National Security’ and if you do, we’ll buy many millions of dollars worth of your gear.” What doesn’t make sense about that?