At the moment the NSA is getting a lot of flak from people all over the world, not just US citizens, over its spying program that was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Not only did we find out that the NSA is spying on its own citizens, but now according to the latest reports, it seems that one of the reasons the NSA is able to gather data is because they could have been paying off security firms to insert code into their software that would make it easier for the NSA to access. This is the latest accusation in which it claims that the NSA paid off security company, RSA, about $10 million to sell encryption software that would be vulnerable to surveillance.
While this has been suspected before and mentioned by Snowden, this report by Reuters would make it the first where an actual company has been named, along with possible monetary compensation at the same time. RSA claims that they were unaware of the NSA’s backdoor capabilities, with the company releasing a statement that says, “RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products […] Decisions about the features and functionality of RSA products are our own.” It was recently that the top executives from tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Yahoo met with President Obama to discuss NSA reforms.
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