Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor

Even when you are a nation state, you still have to worry about other nation states.

The average reader may be surprised by how far this cone can extend in some circumstances.

It has been established that the NSA conducts industrial espionage [0], under the cover of national security [1]. To what degree the term "national security" narrows down the scope of any surveillance measures is likely unfamiliar to the laymen, but an NSA representative gave a short description on the agencies views to that regard in 2013:

"The intelligence community's efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security." [1]

While it affirms that it does not steal trade secrets, the NSA reserves the right to pass on critical information about economic developments towards policy makers, who then can use this knowledge in their decision making.

Notable examples of industrial espionage conducted by the NSA consisted of spying on EU antitrust regulators investigating Google for antitrust violations [1], alleged espionage of business conducted by brazilian oil giant Petrobas [2], international credit card transactions [3], SWIFT [4], and the infamous allegations of espionage against european defense company EADS [5].

It's noteworthy that this short list only comprises cases that got attention of the media, the actual list of targets in europe was much higher, about 2000 companies in europe, many of them defense contractors.[5]

So, to summarize, it may be much easier to fall into this cone, than one would assume. The agency is also at odds with it's own claims as this this excerpt from a Guardian article [2] clearly shows:

"The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber," the agency said in an emailed response to a Washington Post story on the subject last month. [...] "We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries' economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets."

But he again denied this amounted to industrial espionage. "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line." [2]

To me these statements are mutually exclusive: How is providing policy makers with insights from foreign politics and possible industrial espionage (i.e. not necessarily actual technologies, but research objectives of foreign companies) not giving an advantage to domestic companies, if those policy makers act appropriately?

[0]https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use... [1]https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/nsa-spied-on-eu-anti... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra... [3]https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-exclusive... [4] https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/nsa-spying-europ... [5] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/30/airbus_us_german_inte...