How the NSA Is Harming America's Economy 330
anagama writes "According to an article at Medium, 'Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. ... Cisco saw orders in Brazil drop 25% and Russia drop 30%. ... Analysts had expected Cisco's business in emerging markets to increase 6%, but instead it dropped 12%, sending shares of Cisco plunging 10% in after-hours trading.' This is in addition to the harm caused to remote services that may cost $35 billion over the next three years. Then, of course, there are the ways the NSA has made ID theft easier. ID theft cost Americans $1.52 billion in 2011, to say nothing of the time wasted in solving ID theft issues — some of that figure is certainly attributable to holes the NSA helped build. The NSA, its policies, and the politicians who support the same are directly responsible for massive losses of money and jobs."
Re:I'm the only one smelling BS here? (Score:4, Informative)
"Cisco’s techniques cut the effective tax rate on its reported international income to about 5 percent since 2008 by moving profits from roughly $20 billion in annual global sales through the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda"
cite [bloomberg.com]
Re:tough love (Score:5, Informative)
maybe its time we consider going back to software (oss) based networking gear. it will be much slower than hardware based ones but we can't verify hardware designs like we can software ones.
That software has to run on hardware and if you can't trust the hardware you are screwed anyway, it's like trusting your software (oss) encryption when there's a hardware keylogger installed. Send the right magic numbers and the hardware could start doing anything it wants like mirroring traffic, dumping memory, whatever the attacker needs to completely compromise the box. The only advantage would be that it could run on more generic hardware that you hopefully could buy from a more trusted supplier.
Re:And everyone on Slashdot cares about Cisco (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know who is interested in cisco, but you missed the big picture.
Re:And everyone on Slashdot cares about Cisco (Score:5, Informative)
But even if you pop the champagne and throw a party when Cisco is hurt, I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.
Re:Certainly attributable? (Score:4, Informative)
A bit hard to prove a case of it but not too hard to show the possability. Google around for the documented cases in Greece and (IIRC Italy) where organized crime used U.S. mandated back doors into telephone switches to spy on their government.
Re:Certainly attributable? (Score:5, Informative)
> So the particular statement referring to the NSA making identity theft easier is flat out BULLSHIT.
How so? I thought it is pretty much fact. They introduced some weak encryption, and most of all they introduced weak random number generators, which means any key generated using it should be considered compromised. If the NSA can break it, the hackers will learn how to break it, too, especially if there is money behind it.
Re:tough love (Score:3, Informative)
AFAIK, the U.S. only had enough material for the 2 bombs (after testing), which of course was not made public.
Uh, not true. They were pumping out new bombs on a production line, and the third bomb would have been ready to go soon after the second was dropped; Truman vetoed any further use. If I remember correctly, they were up to about one bomb a month by that point, and accelerating.
all not true (Score:3, Informative)
I've personally seen the declassified war documents written by the leaders of the DoD at the time.
Japan was on the verge of surrender before we bombed them. The USA knew this. It was a conditional surrender to USSR. The USA demanded an unconditional surrender to the USA, for strategic and practical reasons. The cold war was already ramping up. The USA President and War Secretary decided to drop the bombs to force this surrender.
You can read about all of the above in these docs. Copies of them are located at the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, Japan. There are copies in the USA as well.
The story we get feed by our teachers growing up in the USA is widely recognized as BS.