Glenn Greenwald: NSA Intercepted And Backdoored Servers

US intelligence agents intercepted a range of machines leaving the country, including servers and routers, to plant backdoors in them, journalist Glenn Greenwald has claimed, in an extract from his book on the Edward Snowden affair, No Place to Hide.

Greenwald cited a June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development division, in which the agency said the devices would call back to its “covert infrastructure”. “This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network,” the report, revealed in the Guardian, read.

Greenwald revelations

Agents would collect devices, tamper with them, before repackaging them as if they were new, Greenwald claimed.

He suggested the US and Chinese were competing for digital surveillance supremacy. The US has a strong stance against use of Chinese networking gear, especially kit made by Huawei.

“Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the motives behind the US government’s claims that Chinese devices cannot be trusted,” Greenwald wrote in his book, due out today.

“But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA’s own reach. In other words, Chinese routers and servers represent not only economic competition but also surveillance competition.”

Previous Snowden leaks indicated PC and laptop shipments were being intercepted and tampered with in similar ways.

What do you know about tech whistleblowers? Take our quiz!