No no, I’m not saying your conspiracy theories aren’t unfounded. As a matter of fact, there was a HUGE hullabaloo a few years ago when it was revealed that Cisco’s Chinese manufacturer was installing modified iOS distros with backdoors for Chinese hackers. Cisco released several emergency updates to fix those backdoors, but the cat was out of the bag.
I agree that network hardware, most operating systems, and even your network-connected devices (laptops, tablets, phones, TVs, your FRIDGE) have backdoors. What I’m saying is that cryptography is an industry that absolutely MUST be secure. Entire industries, including the government, relies on authorities like Thawte and Verisign to provide certificates and secure connections. I’m not saying that they can’t intercept that traffic, but if it’s encrypted, it’s easy pickins for them.
The NSA even admitted that MOST of their data logging occurs on websites without SSL. I worry about FR sometimes for that reason. We’re all chatting on HTTP here at FR. That means when you login, your username and password are passed to the FR servers in cleartext. Someone could easily login as you if they wanted.
“if it’s NOT encrypted, it’s easy pickin’s.”
God has an all seeing eye.
They dealt with that in the middle ages.
We get a lower harmonic of that fact of life with our government and a few centuries of added time.