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

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