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Comment by resu | Hacker News Reader

So stay away from routers that are Made in China and Made in USA - what's left?

Is there a country small enough without a world domination agenda, yet large enough to not be swayed by bullying from U.S, China etc.? It's time to start a router manufacturing business there...

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There are basically three sovereigns left in the world. You've listed two, and the third is where Snowden ran. Everywhere else has chosen to give up on the idea of ultimate state security in favor of economic cooperation, and has therefore lost a bit of self-determination and will be easily subverted by agents of the three.

The takeaway from Snowden's revelations shouldn't be that we need a sacrosanct place for trustable manufacturing / hosting / development. It's that all of these "hypothetical" subversions are actually continually taking place on an institutionalized scale by many parties, and to have any hope of having anything ever being autonomously secure (rather than ultimately ruled by informational superemperors), we really need to get serious about stomping out reliance on centralized authority/closed source/trusted hardware/etc.

...perhaps the answer is to layer everything behind interleaved stacks of these sovereign's hardware.

That way, you can count that any traffic is known to them all, and thus avoid surprise.

The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.

So not only routers.

So that means that if you buy and use the router in the USA, your router will be clean, but if the routers get shipped overseas they are corrupted?

It's not all overseas hardware; it's probably just a few targeted customers. This has been going on since the cold war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage

Speculative hearsay with no hard evidence.

What's your source? Mine is the CIA.

"Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline, and defective plans disrupted the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory." ~ https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

Well being inside the USA doesn't protect you from receiving modified equipment, it has been reported that the NSA will, for certain "Persons of interest", intercept hardware in transit and compromise it.

Sounds like yet another manufacturing market for Germany to take up.

NSN makes routers. However, you don't see the German state or key German companies actually doing anything about the NSA. Complaining, yes, doing no.

That probably means the NSA and other US intelligence and military are so far in the Germans' pants it's really not possible for the Germans to have meaningful autonomy.

Even nominally neutral Austria is a wholly owned subsidiary: http://www.ceiberweiber.at/index.php?type=review&area=1&p=ar...

You could use a MikroTik Routerboard.

You could also install their RouterOS on an old PC of yours however you won't have too much fancy hardware acceleration. Should be fine for home use though.

Perhaps Switzerland. Doesn't meet the "large enough" definition, but they are very pro-privacy and anti-snooping.

Labor is crazy expensive there though.

They were. What they are now: people living in a landlocked country in the middle of a huge economically-integrated entity (the EU) on which they are fully dependant. Check what's happening with banking laws (until recently, the holiest of all Swiss taboos)... short story: from now on, if the EU says jump, Switzerland can only ask "how high?"

> It's time to start a router manufacturing business there...

Or install pfsense on an old PC and hope for the best

You'll not only have to manufacture them, you'll also have to make sure the shipping isn't routed through any country with a creepy spy agenda.

The country that gave us Nokia?

One can dream.

Finland is a young country. It didn't exist before 1917.

Though not technically behind the iron curtain, Finland was largely a Soviet client from the end of WWII.

http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=257979

Subtract the time Finland spent under Soviet domination, and then subtract its years in the EU, and Finland has only been a truly independent actor from 1917-1939 and then from 1991-1995.

It doesn't seem reasonable to compare EU membership to Soviet domination - apart from the values involved, just thinking about the degree of intervention or control.

I'm making no criticism of Finland. The parent was looking for a technologically advanced country to step up and be to networking gear as Switzerland (was) to banking.

I pointed out that Finland is in a more precarious position than people realize.

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