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The United States is once against spying on its citizens and this time they’re doing it via Internet routers.


That’s at least what Glenn Greenwald is claiming in the Guardian. According to the journalist, routers assembled in the US are being intercepted and modified with backdoors before they’re sent to stores.These modified devices would then contact the NSA once plugged into the Internet and allow access to full networks.

The report surfaced because of a June 10th document from the NSA’s Access and Target Development Department in which they thoroughly described the process and called it a very “hands-on” experience.


The U.S government has long claimed that China has been implanting their smartphones with devices to listen in on Americans through companies like Huawei.

This caused Huawei’s CEO Ren Zhengfei to announce the company’s departure from the the US market late last year only to take it back a month later.

In response to Greenwald’s claim, the NSA has issued two statements to Techcrunch. Here’s the first one:

“As we have said before, the U.S. technology industry builds the most secure hardware and software in the world today. NSA relies on these products to help protect our nation’s most sensitive information and, over the past decade, has turned to commercial technology to replace government-built technology. Given its own reliance on many of the very same technologies that the public uses, the U.S. Government is as concerned as the public is with the security of these products. While we cannot comment on specific, alleged intelligence-gathering activities, NSA’s interest in any given technology is driven by the use of that technology by foreign intelligence targets. The United States pursues its intelligence mission with care to ensure that innocent users of those same technologies are not affected.”


And the second one:

“As we have previously said, the implication that NSA’s foreign intelligence collection is arbitrary and unconstrained is false. NSA’s activities are focused and specifically deployed against – and only against – valid foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements. We are not going to comment on specific, alleged foreign intelligence activities. Public release of purportedly classified material about U.S. intelligence collection systems, without context, further confuses an important issue for the country and jeopardizes human life as well as national security sources and methods.”


This comes to light after the Director of the NSA, Mike Rogers, called for more transparency in the agency on Monday.

Julian Reyes is a VR Producer for Fusion.