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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 24 2015, @09:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-that's-why-the-antivirus-programs-run-so-slowly dept.

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to a story at Glen Greenwald's Intercept. The document, a GCHQ warrant renewal request written in 2008 and provided under Section 5 of the U.K.'s 1994 Intelligence Services Act, must be renewed by a government minister every six months and seeks authorization for GCHQ activities that "involve modifying commercially available software to enable interception, decryption and other related tasks, or 'reverse engineering' software."

Of note is that while Kaspersky Labs is particularly singled out, Bitdefender, ESET, Avast, AVG, and F-Secure are also mentioned as specific targets, while the US/UK based McAfee, Symantec and Sophos are all notable by their absence raising questions over whether they have might colluded with the NSA and GCHQ, or whether the other vendors mentioned might have colluded with their own national security services. Should that be the case then the debate over the merits of whether or not compromising encryption tools is a good idea given the potential for the backdoor to be found and exploited by foreign governments and criminals perhaps ought to apply to more general security software as well.


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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:18PM (#200475)

    Patriotism is about wanting what is best for your country.

    Careful there, lots of morons think killing niggers and mooslims are patriotic acts because the best thing for the country would be to be populated exclusively by white christians.

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