No that would make 0 sense. The NSA doesn't "attack" american companies with covert implants.
They get FISA court orders that force american companies to attach their equipment.
They get FISA court orders that force american companies to attach their equipment.
Specific example aside, it's worth talking about why this does happen. "Black bag jobs" can mean "we didn't get a warrant", but they can also mean "we got a warrant and still aren't telling".
Even given a court order, there's still a possibility that employing surveillance by fiat will cause somebody to leak, or modify how they handle data, or simply reveal information about what sort of surveillance tools a given agency employs. Given that a FISA order can be obtained without a defendant, getting a court order and then doing the thing secretly anyway gives a sort of "bowling with bumpers" advantage where the project is approved if it gets revealed, but also done without revealing anything if it isn't.
More disturbingly, there's also substantial evidence that the NSA attacks companies covertly in places where they couldn't get a court order. Taking a specific device out of the supply chain and adding surveillance before it's shipped to the destination is a warrant-worthy project. Setting up systematic physical vulnerabilities with a use case of "turn it on some time in the future to get something interesting" isn't in the purview of a FISA order, so if the NSA did do that it would have to be without an order.
Other NSA programs that Snowden revealed were covert hacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
PRISM was at first reported as some sort of direct access to the servers of certain American companies, but it turned out to be the code name for a joint program with the FBI for using FISA warrants to request data from those companies.
You can see how this benefits the NSA; if the voice mail is outsourced to a foreign company, and the NSA buys intel from that company, it's technically not spying on US citizens, particularly if they're getting metadata.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04...
Additionally, the story quoted talks about how the UK obtained the data and gave it to the NSA.
Nowhere is the NSA installing covert implants. They just don't do that.
The CIA does that :)
Ah, so he pinky-promised? Well OK then!
You are taking the word of a spy? Did he say it wittingly?
PRISM
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/backdoors_in_...
> Juniper has confirmed that an initial analysis of malware linked to the National Security Agency appears to affect its firewalls.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/juniper-confirms-leaked-nsa-ex...