Cisco Sales Start To Encounter NSA Fallout  

Cryptogon points to some interesting history about mobile phone operating systems - The Second Operating System Hiding in Every Mobile Phone.

The Find:

Back in July 2013, The Washington Post reported that nearly a decade ago, the National Security Agency developed a new technique that allowed spooks to “find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this ‘The Find,’ and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.” Many security researchers scratched their heads trying to figure out how this could be so.

Maybe it’s malware.

Maybe it’s a feature.

One obvious outcome of the NSA and its friends backdooring all modern technology is that people are starting to avoid buying it - Cisco are starting to see the impact of this in their emerging markets sales - Cisco’s gloomy revenue forecast shows NSA effect starting to hit.

Cisco has shocked financial analysts — who were expecting healthy growth — by predicting a 10 percent sales slump during the current quarter. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the standout one is the backlash in emerging markets against the activities of the U.S. signals intelligence agency, the NSA.

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Communications infrastructure is absolutely central to the surveillance scandal, and that’s Cisco’s business. An American networking firm was never going to come out of this mess well – and the whole infrastructure business is in a state of upheaval anyway — but the figures are sobering nonetheless.

In the last quarter, on which Cisco was reporting on Wednesday, the company saw a sudden 21 percent revenue drop in its top 5 emerging markets: 25 percent down in Brazil, 18 percent down in India, Mexico and China, and 30 percent down in Russia.