THE third most important set of revelations from Snowden's treasure trove of NSA documents took place last week. Der Spiegel, a leading German newspaper, published a set of reports that show how networks and computers have been compromised by the NSA. This was complemented by Jacob Appelbaum's address in the 30th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, which brought out the range of methods that NSA uses to take over and eavesdrop on networks and systems. What also stands out is the number of American companies that have such “backdoors” in their systems and equipment.
