this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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So this is horseshit, right?
First of all, ALL routers from ANY country are a security risk? Every single other nation is trying to make Spyware for the average American consumer? Doubt.
Second, they are extremely concerned with all consumers' security from foreign actors to the point it needs an outright ban on hardware to protect us. God forbid I buy an AVM router from Germany and open up my home networking to German Spies. What if they find out I sometimes visit porn websites and yourube!?
Third, that the US government, themselves, are trustworthy and wont force backdoors into systems to allow them unfettered access into private networks, something that they HAVE TRIED TO AND SUCCEEDED TO DO IN THE PAST. And also something that they are very clearly opening the door for with all of these legal pushes toward requiring age verification software and OS's. They want to ban foreign routers so that you have to buy routers from companies that they can control. They can ask, coerce and force them to give them access behind the scenes for some bullshit excuse ("protect the kiddies", "law enforcement", "national security", "terrorism"), force them to not tell the public, and then "secretly" monitor every device in the entire country. They are almost certainly already doing this with a significant number of US manufacturers and software developers.
Fuck these fascists.
I find it unlikely to be about security. Either it is about control or about money (pressure to induce bribery for lifting), or a combination of both.
It is entirely true that all models from all manufacturers are compromised by spy agencies. However the worst offender by far is Cisco even though they’re “American”.
I think there's a little bit of space between "spy agencies employ systems professionals that know the guts of a component's security and tricks to bypass it" and "every device firmware has a double super secret protocol for sidestepping all of its security features".
Sure. I'm willing to believe that Cisco, specifically, has relationships with the Five Eyes network such that they make monitoring their traffic easier. Even then, there's limits. One thing to say techniques exist to bypass security. Another entirely to know what those techniques are and whether they're practical for application at universal scale.
One of the more chronic problems that big spy agencies have is sifting through all the spam and bullshit and empty chatter. Decryption takes time. And you can't monitor everything, everywhere, all at once. The bigger sins of Cisco are in how they expedite access on behalf of their agency partners, not that they fail to produce perfectly hack-proof hardware.