Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices

Re:Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices by Shacklz on Sunday November 29, 2020 @04:27AM (#25244006)

I was at first very disappointed to read Ueli Maurer's name in the article; I attended quite a few of his lectures. According to the interview with him on the "Rundschau" (unfortunately in Swiss German), he hasn't known about anything and was certain himself that Omnisec didn't have anything to do with the NSA. However, I still struggle to see what exactly his involvement was with them - he was a "Berater" (consultant), but says that he didn't really have any insight into the algorithms etc. and couldn't have possibly known about their issues; so what exactly did he do for them, just sell his name?

I really appreciated him as a prof (even though he was known to be a complete hard ass when it came to exams with high bars to pass) and would be surprised if anything turned up that would question his integrity further; still, it does leave a bit of a bad taste after all his preaching...

And as a Swiss, this is a complete fiasco. That the issue with Crypto AG didn't send a few heads in the NDB rolling was an absolute disgrace, they didn't even pretend to be humbled by this or anything of that sort. And now another such story emerges, and while I do hope that we finally see some action now, I wouldn't be surprised if nothing happened again.

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Re:Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices by nix23 on Sunday November 29, 2020 @05:26AM (#25244215)

>And as a Swiss, this is a complete fiasco.

Yes, and whats even worse, the politicians where kind of proud what they achieved with CryptoAG and called it a "grand coup". It's disgusting, first Switzerland is neutral, and second, trust in any security related product are absolutely smashed now.

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Re:Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices by patrickk on Sunday November 29, 2020 @09:09AM (#25245176)

Protonmail users must be getting nervous.

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Re:Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices by xyquadrat on Sunday November 29, 2020 @11:55AM (#25246289)

As a current student of Ueli Maurer and a Swiss citizen, I completely agree with you (the exam part is hard for me to judge... that's coming up in January for me). He claims that he did review algorithms for them, but only once did he look into one which actually got used in production.

I strongly hope that such cases where our NDB is passively allowing foreign nations to interfere with security equipment that is even used by Swiss companies will not become more frequent. It cannot be allowed that the secret service of a neutral country like Switzerland continues to act like this.

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Re:Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices by feralimal on Sunday November 29, 2020 @04:55AM (#25244105)

What kind of action do you expect to see?

You do realise that governance is how corporations manage the people, not how people manage corporations, right?

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