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Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers
(www.theregister.com)
It's the US. Anyone surprised?
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
1147 points (99.6% liked)
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Well no, they tend to copy a lot from China these days.
I’m starting to believe a lot of the bad we hear about China is at best overblown and at worst completely fucking made up.
Remember all the articles predicting their doom because they built “ghost cities” and “trains to nowhere” and now they’re all actual cities with employed populations and there is high speed rail everywhere?
Yeah since 9/11 we’ve only had liars in charge seeing how much they can milk all of us, and apparently America really does have great ties because they’re still honkin and we’re still letting em.
Anyway since we can’t tell what’s true and what’s a lie thanks to the “state dept” propaganda I’m just gonna go ahead and say that the most advanced country on earth is probably way ahead of the USA.
There are also ghost cities that basically got demolished, like dozens of skyscrapers one after the other.
Two counties can be bad at the same time, not everything has to be nalck and white. China can suck also when the US sucks. China can even suck despite doing a lot of cool things.
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They don't copy the part where they execute billionaires, unfortunately https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-23/china-executes-14-billionaires-in-8-years-culture-news-reports
Although, if you're an influential billionaire you don't get executed but get disappeared for some time, like jack ma, giving the general feeling that they want to control billionaires and not just get rid of them
With our current dotard leadership it's surprising they haven't banned routers completely.
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There are routers made in US?
No. Which is the point. Everything has to be approved manually with no specific criteria so they can arbitrarily make the decisions they want.
And in the trump economy, that includes paying a hefty bribe for approval
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This affects firmware too. Not just the hardware.
According to the BBC, the one exception is the newer Starlink Wi-Fi router, which the company says is manufactured in Texas.
This is exasperating.
Cisco, Juniper, and Arista are US companies. The actual manufacturing is doubtlessly somewhere in Asia though.
This tells me any equipment that is classified as acceptable by these requirements is immediately suspect, and should not be permitted to connect to, or communicate with, equipment you need to trust.
I’m well versed in the CALEA capabilities of DOCSIS equipment, hence my comment.
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What happened to small government?
I live in probably one of the reddest states, and it's always been hypocrisy. Republicans are lying out of their lower lie holes every fucking time they open their mouths.
Every single Republican politician and voter is a purely evil person.
Politician, sure. But people are easily duped, especially when they're uneducated. That doesn't make them evil, especially when there's a multi-billion dollar disinformation network constantly trying to mislead them.
At what point does ignorance cross into willful ignorance? And at what point does willful ignorance become malicious? It’s a blurry line, to be sure.
It crosses into willful ignorance once they reject an empathetic articulation of the information and they become malicious at roughly the same time. Though this is less “becomes” so much as “is revealed to be” i think
Very true. Thank you for helping to ground me.
And thank you both for reminding me why I like this place.
🤘
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I dont know if I'd say evil but they're definitely uninformed and ignorant.
They've been fed nothing but lies and propaganda and taught that the other side is evil, and if they're religious it's exactly the same as being in a full on cult with no bearing on reality.
Sure, some of us like myself were smart enough to realize its a massive grift . not everyone has the brainpower.
Making the government small enough to fit into every aspect of your life. No crevice too small.
It's always been imaginary. They think that private property is a natural right, so a government with lots of soldiers and police is small.
The founding fathers loved small government that defended their teensy little slave plantations. They passionately argued about freedom with other rich white men.
Everyone who honestly wants small government eventually realizes that none was ever necessary at all.
Small government meant, as usual, the other guys.
Their government can piss away as much money and get as big and invasive as they want.
Of course they're banning foreign routers. They want all Americans to have only routers with government backdoors. At this point, backdoor-free routers are a threat to 'national security'.
Every accusation of them is an admission of guilt.
So stop buying any US made hardware.
This is why open source and open hardware is so important.
still doesn't stop for supply chain attacks, but still a better alternative to whatever shit they're going to ramrod into "US made" tech.
There is an exemption for products that the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security have granted "Conditional Approval" after finding these devices do not pose such unacceptable risks. Router makers can apply to the FCC to get on the approved list.
Wow, what an insane coincidence it's exactly those two departments and no one else. Golly, I wonder why. (Edit: To clarify, if you're going to do this stupid, posturing bullshit, I "get" the DoD because of the NSA, and DHS has CISA. Just really no one else? Seems like consolidating more control.)
I mean... supply chain hardening has been a concern for most of the three letter agencies (and governments around the world) for years. There are very serious concerns over how basically every NIC comes out of a factory in China and what the implications of that are.
If DoD actually do have a list of vetted and hardened products, that WOULD be a very good baseline for if you care about security at all. Less so from the US government, but that can then be compared against similar lists from other countries.
And considering that basically every TLA has the same concerns, if those orgs are willing to spend their budget? DoE and the like ain't gonna complain.
I do care about cybersecurity, but I'm well past a point with the Trump administration where it's possible to take even the few good-sounding things coming out of it at face value. I don't believe for a second Trump or anyone in his cabinet values cybersecurity over: jingoistic "Made in America" posturing to his audience, enforcing a monopoly on spying on US citizens, giving as much power as possible to the two departments he's most heavily and illegally abusing, and using this as more "trade war" bullshit where multinational corporations can personally bribe him to get whitelisted.
I might celebrate this if we had a POTUS who hadn't demonstrated over and over for a decade that everything they do is a ploy to turn the US into a kleptofascist hellscape.
I agree with you; your concerns are rational. I don't think you or I share them with the Trump administration.
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Cisco is such a joke
They are the defacto bones of the Internet purely for their legacy. The company is so glut with inefficiency.
My small (~100 employee) company that had nothing to with hardware got bought by a somewhat larger (~1500) mostly-Finnish company that was sort of a competitor with the much larger Cisco. Cisco bought that company and six months later laid off all of us except the C-suite types. I occasionally still talk to my manager who is still with Cisco and he says everyone he interacts with there is so far removed from any consideration of products or profits or that sort of thing that it never even comes up in casual conversation. I asked him what he actually does now and he said "I have no idea".
My favorite memory of that six months was the mandatory security training, which consisted of a series of badly-animated shorts featuring talking bears and a narrator who was clearly ready to kill himself over having to say "personally-identifiable information" over and over and over again.
Welp, so much for OpenWRT on cheap devices designed for routing (even though flashing the firmware to install it probably got rid of any backdoors anyway); now we'll have to resort to OPNSense on overkill PC hardware.
Came here to say... US (and everyone else) would be way more secure if it mandated routers use OpenWRT and funded a few red/blue security engineers to work on it full time
So like what router should I be using that isn't going to be spying on me? Been feeling it's time for an upgrade my current ASUS router was a higher end model when I bought it but it is like 8 or 9 years old now
Pfsense or opensense
Sorry this article kinda lit a fire under my ass to get a new router, so I've been researching. Was looking into this and it feels like openWRT might be the way for me personally, the simpler and cheaper, while doing all the stuff I need it to do is more appealing to me.
Also thinking about going with a router that has the longe range 802.11ah HaLow 915mhz, I've got a big house and the wifi is bad in one area. I've also been dabbling in the sub ghz meshtastic and meshcore devices and I'm thinking it could be a fun thing to experiment with.
Few videos for reference Sub gHz 802.11ah Halow Wifi https://youtu.be/-soMNhNqEVc
Video that touches on why I think openWRT might be a better fit for me than pfsense or open-ended
Let me know yall's thoughts.
I turned off wifi on my router and instead use multiple wifi access points connected to the router by ethernet. It's way easier to get good coverage and speeds that way.
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Opnsense is great, I run it on a N100 mini pc I got from AliExpress for a couple hundred NZD. Doesn't break a sweat up to 8gbit
There is an element of hypocrisy in all this because American intelligence agencies were previously caught intercepting Cisco-made routers on their way to customers and updating their firmware to deploy espionage tools.
It's not hypocrisy to try to spy on others while preventing them from spying on you.
I went ahead and bought some new internet hardware. It sucks to spend money before my gear has died of natural causes, but this might be the last real opportunity to upgrade before backdoors become the norm. If they aren't already.
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