Cisco tries to avoid the NSA by shipping equipment to weird places

One of the most successful U.S. National Security Agency spying programs involved intercepting IT equipment en route to customers and modifying it. At secret workshops, backdoor surveillance tools were inserted into routers, servers and networking equipment before the equipment was repackaged and sent to customers outside the U.S. The program, run by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group, was revealed by documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reported by Der Spiegel and Glenn Greenwald. It was one of many revelations about the NSA that caused widespread suspicion that U.S. technology products shouldn’t be trusted, even if companies strenuously denied helping the agency. And it appears some Cisco Systems customers have since taken steps to prevent NSA tampering. The company has shipped equipment to addresses that are unrelated to a customer, said John Stewart, Cisco’s chief security and trust officer, on Wednesday during a panel session at the Cisco Live conference in Melbourne.