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Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

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Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#291

How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Are the journalists just that *uncurious* about the deep contents of the documents they hold exclusive access to? Was this some kind of organizational failing?

Snowden leaked a shit ton of documents, the vast majority of which had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of NSA wrongdoing. Journalists then had to go through and try to figure out what these documents actually meant (which they frequently misunderstood). Obviously they're still doing it to today.

>Snowden leaked a shit ton of documents, the vast majority of which had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of NSA wrongdoing

Like how NSA collects a shit ton of data on citizens... the vast majority of which has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of wrongdoing.

I'm only pointing this out because your comment has a negative tone towards what Snowden did.

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#293

How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Are the journalists just that *uncurious* about the deep contents of the documents they hold exclusive access to? Was this some kind of organizational failing?

I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.

sounds like something LLMs can help with, sift through huge amounts of documents to summarize and highlight the interesting ones

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#294

Very impressive work by the NSA, if true. Both from a political and technical perspective. It's good to know that our intelligence services are doing what they're supposed to, and doing it well. However, as interesting as this revelation is, it's unfortunate that Snowden decided to defect to the Russians and share his stolen cache of top secret documents with them and China, using Western journalists as ideological c…

This is the thing that rubs me the wrong way about Snowden - had he stayed and faced the music as a true whistleblower, he would've earned my respect for sticking to principles and acting as a loyal citizen acting in the interest of the country, even in the face of persecution. He did not do that. Instead, he's living a comfortable life in the bowels of a country that is committing vicious, daily war crimes. I don't…

Was he not living a comfortable life in the bowels of a country that was committing vicious, daily war crimes when he lived in the USA? We kill/displaced over a million civilians in Iraq, not to mention the mess we left in Afghanistan. The carnage we've unleashed with drone warfare, CIA black sites, Guantanamo Bay, ect...

Yes, Russia are the bad guys, but we have done some truly heinous things as well. Snowden revealed a little of the crimes we commit and you're ready to wash him away because it hurts your position that we are somehow morally superior to other countries?

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#295
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your risk identifying yourself in the Ashley Madison leak. You run the risk of not getting your message out in the Snowden case. The biggest threat is future publishing which is why so many countries broke laws made up charges going after Wikileaks. A wikileak revival scares the most powerful

It would also be allot of fun

[dead]

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#296
post #180
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS support is pretty fucking terrible generally. We’re a very high rolling enterprise customer and it’s pretty obvious that some of their shit is being managed by two guys in a shed somewhere who don’t talk to each other.

Using AWS Greengrass?

Greengrass was so bad we built an entire edge platform.

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is incredibly rich. Snowden is undoubtedly on the US' "really, really naughty" list -- would you, personally, sit back and be imprisoned for the rest of your life (and possibly be tortured), or live comparatively freely elsewhere? > I don't hear him make a peep about kidnapped Ukrainian children, or the civilians that Russia tortures and kills. Can you really not see why that would be a bad idea? He's ki…

Snowden's past actions were never heroic, that is just spin manufactured by journalists with a vested interest in constructing a narrative. He's been arrogantly self-serving from the start, and it's rather disappointing that some people still haven't grown out of their juvenile phase of blind hero worship.

> He's been arrogantly self-serving from the start

Maybe if he was as self-serving as you thought he'd continue to live a comfortable life while destroying the rule of law that we pretend to have instead of having to abandon his home and never again be able to see his country or friends again?

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#298

When I buy something electronic, my approach is "everything that is closed and goes online will be used to spy on people". It may seem a stretch, but governments can't exercise power over something they cannot control, and truly private communications would take away some of that control. To me there are no conspiracy theories or other strange reasons for being able to decrypt any seemingly private information except…

It's clear that they feel that way also. The engineer Andreas Spiess recently appeared in a briefing on dangerous, anarchy-enabling technologies simply for making a youtube video on an encrypted messaging protocol over lora mesh networking. They're carefully watching and cataloging any communications technology they can't compromise.

It's also hard to distinguish between legitimate security threats and scare tactics designed to make us think we're in danger. Remember the Bloomberg Supermicro "bombshell"[0]? I still don't know if that was ever confirmed true or false, but to my knowledge Bloomberg never retracted it.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/12/supermicro_bloomberg_...

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#299
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had other issues with our CloudHSM instance, especially with the PKCS1.5 deprecation on January 1. And their support has been pretty dismal. Not expecting much from them at this point.

AWS support is pretty fucking terrible generally. We’re a very high rolling enterprise customer and it’s pretty obvious that some of their shit is being managed by two guys in a shed somewhere who don’t talk to each other.

Have you had the pleasure of working with Azure? I'll take AWS any day over that dumpster fire.

Re: Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

#300
I don’t know much about security, especially at the hardware level. However, I have a question for those of you that do.

Suppose you were given a healthy budget, a team, and a few years. Would you be able to build network hardware that did not contain back doors? How healthy would the budget need to be? How skilled would the team need to be? I assume you’d have to assume most external vendors are compromised and rebuild whatever you needed from them. What would that take?

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