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Comment by jryle70 | Hacker News Reader

Before Snowden revealing NSA's shadowy campaigns, any claims of such effort was met with strong skepticism, just like yours. Which may have been justified at the time. But that was eight years ago. This is 2021. You are absolutely right to raise your skepticism, but dismissing it outright because proofs haven't been presented is naive.

Many many classified information didn't see the light decades after they happened. I don't see why this isn't such a case.

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If Bloomberg had written about "this is happening according to sources" people would not be reacting as they do to an "this happened, look at these pictures that are obviously fake" article.

This is nothing like a pre-Snowden talk about NSA where someone theorised what was happening. This would be like if Snowden was quoted anonymously in an article and proof that was clearly fake was shown as actual leaks. Sure hardware modifications like this is happening (we know NSA does so) but this particular article (well, two now) is pure fluff and FUD pretending to have real proof. There's an interesting discussion to be had about this topic but those articles would make anyone a laughingstock if used as facts in the discussion.

> This is nothing like a pre-Snowden talk about NSA where someone theorised what was happening.

There was something visceral about seeing a picture[1] of the NSA giving an intercepted Cisco router a hardware "upgrade" (beacon) in the Snowden files. Bloomberg tried to something similar for their story, but with fake pictures - that was a terrible idea.

1. Probably don't open this link if you have a security clearance - I haven't been following the status of the Snowden files, but it probably is still considered to be classified info https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

And after claims of Iraqi involvement in 9/11 and WMDs that never materialized, I'm pretty skeptical about unproven, geopolitically convenient news reporting.

The thing is that NSA was engaging in a shadowy campaign. It wasn't possible to conclusively prove or disprove it. This story isn't. It's making factual claims, that there are physical backdoors in hardware that is publicly available. From then on its possible to settle the matter by buying such a motherboard, and using this to produce hard evidence of the backdoor. It wasn't possible to go to the nearest NSA field office to get yourself a copy of XKeyScore.

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