Cisco is Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Protect Customers; Meanwhile Amazon Refuses to Provide Any Transparency

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Examining the distinct ways in which various technology/internet companies have responded to revelations that the U.S. government is grossly violating American citizens’ 4th Amendment rights with its unconstitutional mass surveillance can be quite telling. A really interesting case in point came across my screen today.

On the one hand, we have Cisco, which seems to be trying its best to get hardware from one place to another without the NSA intercepting it and implanting malware. On the other hand, we have Amazon, which refuses to provide even the most basic transparency report when it comes to government data requests. Thanks for nothing Bezos.

Let’s start with Cisco. The Register reports that:

Cisco will ship boxes to vacant addresses in a bid to foil the NSA, security chief John Stewart says.

The dead drop shipments help to foil a Snowden-revealed operation whereby the NSA would intercept networking kit and install backdoors before boxen reached customers.

The interception campaign was revealed last May.

Speaking at a Cisco Live press panel in Melbourne today, Stewart says the Borg will ship to fake identities for its most sensitive customers, in the hope that the NSA’s interceptions are targeted.

“We ship [boxes] to an address that’s has nothing to do with the customer, and then you have no idea who ultimately it is going to,” Stewart says.

Stewart says some customers drive up to a distributor and pick up hardware at the door.

After the hacking campaign Borg boss John Chambers wrote a letter to US President Barack Obama saying the spying would undermine the global tech industry.

At least on the surface, Cisco appears to be trying to do the right thing. Not Amazon, who’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, is happily giving a giant middle finger to all of his customers.

ZDNet reports that:

Amazon remains the only US internet giant in the Fortune 500 that has not yet released a report detailing how many demands for data it receives from the US government.

Although people are starting to notice, the retail and cloud giant has no public plans to address these concerns.

Word first spread last week when the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian, who’s spent years publicly denouncing companies for poor privacy practices, told attendees at a Seattle town hall event that he’s “hit a wall with Amazon,” adding that it’s “just really difficult to reach people there.”

So we got on the phone with Amazon to ask why it hasn’t disclosed its figures yet.

After a brief exchange, spokesperson Ty Rogers did not return a request for comment. Bill Way, the company’s associate general counsel for privacy, did not return an email asking for comment.

We reached out to nearly 30 people who are currently or formerly associated with the company. After two days of cold-emails, one person who declined to be named said they and others were “under confidentiality obligations” not to discuss such matters. We weren’t getting anywhere.

Amazon hasn’t budged on its privacy stance in years. Because of its lack of clarity on how it handles data requests, Amazon has for the past four years running ranked as one of the lowest companies in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) annual privacy reports.

“Amazon has a tremendous amount of user data, both from its direct retail businesses and from its hosting services through Amazon Web Services, but it fails to let users, and potential users, evaluate their policies and understand how law enforcement seeks to gain access to data stored with them,” the privacy group wrote in its most recent report.

So, why won’t Amazon do it?

We don’t know, and nobody wants to talk. It’s been widely speculated before (though not necessarily naively) that the US government may have asked Amazon to hold back on reporting those figures.

I don’t know, could it be related to a nice $600 million cloud contract with the infamous Central Intelligence Agency?

For related articles, see:

It’s Not Just Spying – How the NSA Has Turned Into a Giant Profit Center for Corrupt Insiders

How the NSA is Actively Helping Saudi Arabia to Crackdown on Dissent

NSA Whistleblower Speaks: “The Ultimate Goal is Total Population Control”

Ex-NSA Chief Keith Alexander is Now Pimping Advice to Wall Street Banks for $1 Million a Month

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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5 thoughts on “Cisco is Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Protect Customers; Meanwhile Amazon Refuses to Provide Any Transparency”

  1. “Cisco will ship boxes to vacant addresses in a bid to foil the NSA, security chief John Stewart says.”

    Seems odd to me that the company would broadcast its strategy to the world and the NSA.

    Reply
  2. Amazon: Nearly 20 Years In Business And It Still Doesn’t Make Money

    How can this be possible, you ask? HELLO!!!

    This monster is being funded by the same sociopaths that built the “track everything” NSA data center. They own you – take a deep breath and get over it…

    Reply
  3. I run some second-hand servers off of ebay that used to belong to Facebook. I know because they still had sticker residue with their lowercase ‘f’ logos and ids on them.

    Now, you know about the subtle shit the NSA’s Tailored Access Ops do to hard drives. Well, getting a backdoor to hard drives is tricky, but these servers — that were deployed en masse at facebook until about 2012 — they’ve basically got the back door wide open to anyone that can get to their network.

    So amazon was using these servers too. And I have very little doubt that the good old NSA — among others — sat all over those servers scooping up raw data. It’s no surprose they;re quiet about it.

    Reply
  4. The gov has been in the total control of the peoples complete life control since before most us were born start with your health, big Pharma, and go from there take a look at all the media talk over parents fighting to not want to poison their children with toxic injections and how they ran that in to the ground publicly punishing the opted out parents if that isn’t control all over the measles when most of the idiots don’t even know the truth that they can look up about those injections all of them in fact now they are pushing for a law to force us to poison all our children people need to wake up to what is really going on and stop being so easily distracted by B.S. before its to late for the next generation of children because if they want to force something they will at any cost in not talking about just money. And spying on us is just another cog in the giant government wheel of power and control over the people.

    Reply

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