Two days ago, coinciding with the release of his new book No Place to Hide, one-time The Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald ran a swan song piece in his former employer’s publication titled “how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers,” heralding the far broader content featured in his book.
In keeping with the trend of recent Snowden Revelations (e.g. drifting away from highlighting ongoing U.S. intelligence agency abuses against American citizens), Greenwald’s piece focused on exposing the NSA’s practice of covertly implanting interception tools in U.S. information and communications technology (ICT) equipment heading overseas. Surprise. Not. The initial Snowden Revelations focused on U.S. intelligence agency compromise of unwilling but sadly witting American internet service and telecommunications providers. It was really only a matter of time until we were to learn that they went after gear-makers and hardware as well. We got a sneak peak at this type of activity in March when Der Spiegel and The New York Times reported on the NSA’s Shotgiant program. Shotgiant not only penetrated the corporate networks of global ICT industry leader Huawei in order to monitor its confidential communications, but also to steal proprietary product information with the intent to use such information to compromise networks into which the Huawei gear would be deployed. (Aside: Lest anyone forget, I work for Huawei - but these are my personal, un-vetted observations) What Greenwald unveiled this week was that not only had American service providers been compromised, but, so too had the ICT hardware and related product of American-based companies. Per Greenwald, as per NSA documentation leaked by Snowden: “The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users.” Interestingly, Greenwald reports on the NSA’s shenanigans in the context of highlighting that what the NSA has been doing is exactly what U.S. Government entities have consistently yet groundlessly scare-mongered might be done through Huawei equipment. In the wake of Greenwald’s article, media reports, social media and other conversations feature some surmising that U.S. intelligence agencies were looking in the mirror, observing their own actions, and presuming that the Chinese Government was doing the same thing with China-based companies. Hence the blockade of Huawei, always accused of but never proven to be potentially complicit. But wait. That assumption doesn’t make sense. Greenwald’s account, and subsequent reporting (e.g. see Wall Street Journal article), seem to indicate that the U.S. vendors whose product was violated were not in fact involved with or aware of the violation, rather, that the NSA was covertly snagging outbound exports and then infecting them with whatnot to enable whatever before sending them off on their merry way. Who knows, we may one day come to learn that the U.S. vendors were indeed complicit, but I very highly doubt it. It is extremely difficult to imagine the vast conspiracy that such complicity would entail. Consider: It was one thing for the NSA to compromise unwilling service providers - via tidy, manageable conspiracies of the C-suite and legal office - to enable the massive siphoning of data. It's another thing altogether to compromise tens or hundreds of thousands of routers and servers. That conspiracy, which would require the complicity of countless employees across a vendor’s organization, would be neither manageable nor sustainable. The surreptitious interception and infection of outbound product “at the border” which Greenwald and subsequent reporters describe would seem a much better way to get backdoors installed, and would certainly be a lot less prone to information leaks and opposition that would arise in terms of working with complicit vendors. Which brings us back to the U.S. Government’s opposition to allowing Huawei to compete in the U.S. If I am correct that the U.S. vendors were not knowingly compromised, and for the reasons I’ve laid out, then I think it’s pretty fair to assume that the U.S. Government knew full well that Huawei being wittingly compromised by the Chinese Government was also highly unlikely and certainly unsustainable. Just as was the case with the unwittingly compromised American ICT exporters, it would require a conspiracy far too vast across a very global and very diverse employee population. So why the Huawei blockade? Well, as some have already mused in the wake of Greenwald’s piece yesterday, perhaps because compromising Huawei gear being shipped to far-flung markets would have been a much more challenging endeavor than intercepting and infecting American-made gear. Greenwald said it better: “Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the motives behind the US government's claims that Chinese devices cannot be trusted. But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA's own reach. In other words, Chinese routers and servers represent not only economic competition but also surveillance competition.”
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