CISCO is willing to ship its routers to vacant addresses for client pickup to evade NSA chop-shop interception

I'm not sure why the spokesman would say this publicly. If I were a paranoid cynical conspiracy theorist, I might conclude it is to to give the "sensitive" customers a false sense of security, and that Cisco could be instead installing the NSA kit right in the factory. But that's just me being tin foil hat bat guano crazy...right?

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Cisco posts kit to empty houses to dodge NSA chop shops
Kit sent to SmallCo of Nowheresville to avoid NSA interception profiles
18 Mar 2015 - Darren Pauli

Cisco will ship boxes to vacant addresses in a bid to foil the NSA, security chief John Stewart says.

The dead drop shipments help to foil a Snowden-revealed operation whereby the NSA would intercept networking kit and install backdoors before boxen reached customers.

The interception campaign was revealed last May.

Speaking at a Cisco Live press panel in Melbourne today, Stewart says the Borg will ship to fake identities for its most sensitive customers, in the hope that the NSA's interceptions are targeted.

"We ship [boxes] to an address that's has nothing to do with the customer, and then you have no idea who ultimately it is going to," Stewart says.

"When customers are truly worried ... it causes other issues to make [interception] more difficult in that [agencies] don't quite know where that router is going so its very hard to target - you'd have to target all of them.

There is always going to be inherent risk."

Stewart says some customers drive up to a distributor and pick up hardware at the door.

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/18/want_to_dodge_nsa_supply_chain_taps_ask_cisco_for_a_dead_drop/