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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

For its first 50 years or so NSA had a dual mission: protect the US from spying while spying on others. But these last 20 years they've undermined that first mission. They've now attacked and weakened American technology so many times that you'd be crazy to trust anything the NSA offers to make you more secure. It doesn't help when they lose control of their own hacking tools igniting a major expansion in ransomware.

I don't think America can ever recover from this breach of trust. Maybe NSA just needs to be shut down entirely. Or at least redefined explicitly as an adversarial agency to everyone.

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> you'd be crazy to trust anything the NSA offers to make you more secure

You'd also be crazy to trust anything made by American gear vendors. This is not the only instance of this, just one of the ones for which FVEY got caught.

Is non-US gear also compromised? Yeah, probably. But the PLA and the GRU can't physically confine you to an 8x8 steel cage on trumped-up charges predicated on the data they exfil from your network.

Your best bet is to buy gear from countries either not-friendly or actively hostile to the country you're in. Sure, you're probably pwned, but they're not sending a SWAT team in an MRAP to shoot your dog, either.

Would you be safe by running multiple layers around your network? Each layer from a different vendor?

It depends on your threat level.

Your best bet is to use things developed entirely in the open. Even if that compromises performance.

That doesn't help if you're trying to be safe from a powerful world government - one with the resources and will to infiltrate an open project for its own ends. It's far less likely that there are US backdoors in Huawei routers (which surely contain Chinese backdoors!) than in any mostly american open-source software you pick.

Huawei routers are well known to be backdoored by the Chinese government. If you’re worried about attacks from nations then you can only build things yourself from scratch, your next best option is things done in the open since the bar for hiding back doors is much higher.

>But the PLA and the GRU can't physically confine you to an 8x8 steel cage on trumped-up charges predicated on the data they exfil from your network.

Actually they can, and with less legal recourse for you than in the US. It just depends on where in the world you happen to be when they decide they want you.

Why bother with cages when you can go straight to Novichoking someone's underpants?

It is entirely nonsensical to me that buying from alibaba would save you from an overly-inquisitive domestic government.

In any country, you'll end up in a steel cage regardless of whether you bought your computer or software from the KGB, NSA, or a homemade kit in a bazaar in Nicaragua made by a kid from Chile.

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." -Harvey Dent

You are correct, and the transition point was 9/11. Before that the NSA was doing good work shoring up our digital infrastructure, as well as working with the FBI to go after international crime syndicates. I wish we could get back to that.

Not at all, it was focused on implementing backdoors and surveillance for decades before that.

> Before that the NSA was doing good work shoring up our digital infrastructure

Yeah, like introducing the Clipper chip!

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