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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

To be fair to Bloomberg, some of the companies involved were also complicit with the NSA PRISM project and in the initial reporting of that they all denied giving the government a backdoor.

But you're right, it's been a year now and no further evidence has surfaced which seems odd.

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prism is generally thought (by my understanding) to be snooping on lines between data centers without the complicity of the companies targeted

I thought PRISM was an endpoint where companies upload data in response to NSLs. Whether that data is being pulled by a human or by a computer is irrelevant, that data is getting pulled either way.

The original disclosure was about a targeted hack. What further evidence would you expect to appear?

Regarding the "spy chip" story: Other sources. Or other news agencies confirming the sources used. Or any evidence of the chips being planted on any hardware at all.

To be clear: I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that I'm skeptical about the validity and details of their story unless they have something to back it up with.

They had multiple sources.

And the story was that the targeted boards were either destroyed or handed off to the government, are you asking for someone to have probably risked jail time by holding onto one of them?

> are you asking for someone to have probably risked jail time by holding onto one of them?

You’re the first person to even propose such a thing

..no I'm not. They handed over the boards as part of an investigation. Withholding evidence in an investigation involving national security, along with all the false statements you'd need to make in order to make that happen is a great way to not see your family for a few years. I'm not the first to suggest this.

Just because it's hard to do in a way that ensures the safety of the sources doesn't justify any sense of trustworthiness.

In national security matters like this it's okay to be skeptical about reporting and sources because journalists have gotten in wrong before, probably because of how difficult it is to investigate without endangering the sources.

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