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I hardly think apple or any company are dumb enough to name their backdoor publicly nsagate as a subdomain to their company's domain, it's probably some kind of service, since apple prefixes lots of things with NS (NextStep), it could also be initials for a billion other words, see http://www.acronymfinder.com/NSA.html

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However, if it were for Next Step A:

> Ping request could not find host nsbgate.apple.com.

They also had salt.apple.com and pepper.apple.com. And still functional: apple.apple.com

well I guess it doesn't stand for next step a, or they didn't need any more names than 'a' and never went for 'b' ;)

Also it could be "Next Step Administration", "Next Step Access", etc.. there are a billion possibilities, I'm not saying apple doesn't give access to NSA, they surely do, but I'm saying they obviously won't do it this way ;)

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