

NSA May Have Undercover Operatives in Foreign Companies - dsr12
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/nsa-may-undercover-operatives-foreign-companies-new-documents-show/

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privong
There is already extensive discussion of this from a post[0] of the original
Intercept article.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441055)

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brudgers
Duh. A few hundred million dollars or so is sufficient to align the economic
interests of ordinary people with those of a state actor. If the three letter
agencies did not, they would be rightly judged professionally incompetent.

At the level of state sponsored espionage it's more efficient to compromise
security at the production line than to compromise a secure device after the
fact. There are of thousands of people involved in making our hardware and
writing the software that controls it. Each is a potential point of
compromise.

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michaelt
Given that the intelligence community has multi-billion-dollar submarines to
tap undersea cables [1] it seems likely they also use more mundane techniques,
like having agents apply for jobs at technology and communications companies.

It'd be interesting to hear this speculation confirmed as fact though, no
matter how obvious it may seem.

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html?_r=0)

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duaneb
I'm sorry, but if anyone thought otherwise even before snowden, they're
horribly naïve.

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Balgair
True, but it is a bit of a shocker to employers and managers. Imagine you work
at FB and have, say 20 people under you. What are the odds that one of them is
a spy? For what country? Yeah, corporate espionage and all, but still. Also,
how does this play into Apple's claims of security? They cannot trust their
own engineers to make something that even attempts to be well encrypted, they
are ham strung from within.

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foxhill
a spy agency.. doing.. _spy_ work? outrageous.

(i'm not saying i'm ok with it, but if you hire an electrician, don't be
surprised when they start fixing electrical problems..)

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higherpurpose
NSA doing CIA's job, FBI doing NSA's job (spying and hacking into foreign
nations), DHS doing FBI's job, NYPD doing DHS _and_ FBI's job (counter-
terrorism and intelligence) - seems like a lot of mission creep to me. Maybe
we should get rid of half of these.

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sidcool
If they do, it won't come as a surprise to me.

