Businesses Deny Helping NSA Plant Bugs in Americans’ Gadgets

NSA spying could wreak havoc on the national economy, cost the IT space $35-45 billion, creating a digital recession

The stuff of dystopian science fiction has become the reality that Americans are living in. Newly published documents reveal the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is engaging in behavior that many Constitutional experts condemn as criminal.

I. No One is Safe From Those Who Claim to Protect Our Safety

To the NSA every American is a potential criminal. So it uses techniques it borrowed from cybercriminals against every American.

Every American is a target. Your data is mined. It is "temporarily" stored for 15 years. If you type a suspicious query in search engines or social networks, the NSA's autonomous attack system, targets you for deep attacks. These deep attacks reportedly literally watch tens of thousands, if not millions of Americans via compromised webcams.

The NSA has admitted to violating the law "accidentally" thousands of times a year, but refuses to allow outside parties to inspect its behavior. It won't even given special Congressional committees the full story on its tactics. Agents have spied on former lovers. And documents show the last two Presidents have spied on political rivals (including Quakers and Occupy Wall Street activists).

But the NSA documents reveal in Germany this week show there's more.

II. Complicit or Victims? Either Way the Sabotage Threatens to Create an American IT Industry Recession

Jacob Appelbaum, a University of Washington (UW) security research remarked in a weekend keynote:

This part of a constant theme of sabotaging and undermining American companies and American ingenuity. As an American, while generally not a nationalist I find this disgusting, especially as someone that writes free software and would like my tax dollars spent on improving these things. And when they know about them I don't want them to keep it a secret because all of us are vulnerable. It's a really scary thing.

Read the original:

Businesses Deny Helping NSA Plant Bugs in Americans' Gadgets