Monthly Archives: May 2014

Reuters

NOT A CROOK: NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers answers a question at a Reuters CyberSecurity Summit in Washington.

As US National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers seeks to repair the damage to the agency caused by leaks about its electronic spying programs, the abuses of government revealed in the wake of the Watergate scandal are very much on his mind.

As a teenager growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, Rogers recalls watching news broadcasts with his family and being horrified by how the CIA, FBI and NSA had illegally spied on hundreds of thousands of Americans.

"I can remember being very impassioned with my father, and telling him: 'Dad, what kind of nation would we ever want to be that would allow something like this to happen?'" Rogers recalled.

Four decades later, and six weeks into his new job as director of the NSA, the agency is facing similar accusations: that it has used its vast and intrusive surveillance powers to trample on privacy.

Unlike 1975's congressional investigation into intelligence gathering by the CIA, FBI and NSA, today's allegations of rampant US surveillance have unfolded on a global scale, damaging American relations from Brazil to Germany and Indonesia.

While Rogers dismissed direct comparisons - noting that the NSA programs exposed by former contractor Edward Snowden last year had all been deemed lawful - he said he understood the concerns that have been raised about balancing individual privacy rights against security needs.

"We have been down that road in our history, and it has not always turned out well. I have no desire to be part of that," Rogers, 54, told the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit in Washington.

Still, Rogers' declaration that he wants to continue the NSA's controversial search of phone records, known as metadata, has prompted critics to question if the new director really favours change at all.

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NSA's future rests on Admiral Rogers

Summary: The world is changing. Fortunately, the tech industry does one thing very, very well: innovate in a changing world.

Ever since Edward Snowden dumped his load on collaborating journalists more concerned with stickin' it to The Man than with the needs of mankind, the IT industry has been taking it on the chin.

You have to admit, we've had a rough year.

This is an arms race. Willing or not, the tech industry is now a front-line combatant.

It's not just the never-ending blizzard of Snowden flakes flowing over the NSA, it's everything else, too. It's the ginormous breach of credit cards at Target. It's the allegations of spying by the Chinese, culminating in a Justice Department indictment of Beijing officers. It's breach after breach after breach.

And then comes the big revelation. The one that goes beyond "this far and no farther," the straw that broke the camel's back and opened up a can of worms. Yep, Cisco.

Glenn Greenwald, the Snowden flak who made his career this last year on the back of America's security, has a book to hawk. In it, he releases yet another revelation from the Snowden archive. For those of you keeping track, Greenwald's first revelation came on June 6, 2013, which means he's been flogging this horse for 347 days now.

The book contains pictures of so-called "upgrade stations," where the NSA supposedly intercepts Cisco's supply chain and "upgrades" the company's gear so the NSA can gain back-door access.

Even though, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, "links to the actual source information are hard to come by," the damage is done. True or not, Cisco, one of America's greatest technology firms, is under the gun. And, as Cisco boss John Chambers said in a letter to President Obama, "Trust with our customers is paramount, and we do everything we can to earn that trust every day."

Even before Chambers sent his letter to the White House, Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler wrote a similar comment in a blog post, saying, "...We have built and maintained our customers trust. We expect our government to value and respect this trust."

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It's time to stop whining about the NSA and start building solutions