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Cisco writes to Obama - NSA is affecting their sales

  • 20-05-2014 9:23am
    #1
    Impetus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,667 ✭✭✭


    Following John Chamber’s (CISCO CEO) letter to Obama about NSA spying stories affecting the global sales of CISCO products, not unsurprisingly other CEOs of American technology companies have been expressing similar fears and concerns.

    The issue is also affecting media companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook who aspire to grow in China etc.

    Which begs the question why these companies install backdoors etc in their products and services at the behest of gov.us? At a minimum they need something like a CE statement stating that our products/services do not spy on you included in each box and on each About box on a content provider's website. This could then be used in evidence against the company should a victim feel it necessary to sue them for breach of privacy. It would provide work to an entire industry of reverse-engineers and hackers who reviewed the products for spyware etc. Perhaps the EU should expend on the requirements of the CE statement for each product to cover this? Making it far more difficult to export spyware enabled products and services to Europe and elsewhere.

    http://www.nzz.ch/finanzen/uebersicht/finanzportal/nsa-bespitzelung-belastet-technologie-sektor-1.18305904

    (DE.ch)


Comments

  • #2
    Khannie
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 37,485 ✭✭✭✭Khannie


    This was inevitable. There is no way in hell I would buy American kit for my company over the internet now, nor would I trust anything in a data centre belonging to an American company (e.g. Amazon). That just had to bite financially at some point. The NSA are now biting the hand that feeds it (the tax revenue of large American corporations).


  • #3
    syklops
    Closed Accounts Posts: 18,966 ✭✭✭✭syklops


    Khannie wrote: »
    This was inevitable. There is no way in hell I would buy American kit for my company over the internet now, nor would I trust anything in a data centre belonging to an American company (e.g. Amazon). That just had to bite financially at some point. The NSA are now biting the hand that feeds it (the tax revenue of large American corporations).

    But if you're not buying American, presumeably you're buying Chinese/Chinese-controlled?

    Which is less evil?

    Can. Worms. Everywhere!


  • #4
    Khannie
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 37,485 ✭✭✭✭Khannie


    Oh I'm not in charge of purchasing. :) I'm not actually sure what I'd do.


  • #5
    Impetus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,667 ✭✭✭Impetus


    syklops wrote: »
    But if you're not buying American, presumeably you're buying Chinese/Chinese-controlled?

    Which is less evil?

    Can. Worms. Everywhere!

    You can buy European / open source in most cases. Fine the Chinese make a lot of kit like mobile phones and tablet computers, but any company with proprietary intellectual property they want to protect might want to steer clear of this too. (either this or use the phones for talk only and do not expose secret IP to these systems).

    If it is not made in the EU, chances are the Swiss make it. I would not trust Israeli stuff either, because they appear to be in the US's back pocket.

    Aside from data protection, the EU needs a policy to foster IT start-ups and related educational training. We have the CE product safety declaration on many goods. Perhaps we need to include "this product does not include spyware" (legalistically worded). This might give a legal right of action against companies like CISCO if they declared their products to be spyware-free and this was not the case. The damages for breach could be ma$$$$ive for disclosing commercial secrets for example.


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