First of all, while I of all people love to pile onto the anti-NSA bandwagon (within constitutional reason that is, I don't advocate their abolishment, but that's a different conversation), there are quite a few non-three-letter related things that have contributed to this story and ones like it.<p>The primary issue at the heart of things like this, beyond the backdoors and 0-days is this: bad IT.<p>That being said though, bad IT is far too often the fault of upper management, and not the IT people themselves. After years of sysadmining, I've seen the inside of hundreds of companies, from fortune 500 oil to medium sized law firms. You know what they have all been doing over the years? Cutting costs by cutting IT. Exept... they completely fail to consider long term consequences, which end up costing more.<p>I blame things like this on two main groups. Boards of directors, and company executives. Far too often I ran into a situation where a company didn't even have a CIO or a CTO, and you had some senior one man miracle show drowning in technical debt reporting to a CEO or CFO and getting nowhere, and therefore getting no support, no budget, no personell, etc. I've seen exceptions too, but they are far too rare. If it's not technical debt that's drowning the company, it tends to be politics. The bottom line is forward thinking IT personell don't get heard, and inevitably companies hire people or an MSP with all the proprietary, cisco, microsoft, oracle, etc bullshit certs that make the C's feel better, but don't actually produce the wanted results. They inevitably end up providing an inferior product with inferior service at a short term cost just as high as doing it right the first time, and a much higher long term cost.<p>If I could say one thing that could help prevent issues like this, besides my standard whinging on about FOSS and the four freedoms and such, is that we need better CTO's and CIO's to advocate on behalf of IT departments, and I think senior sysadmins who feel they have hit a ceiling should consider going for their MBA's and transitioning to those titles.<p>Now, onto the NSA angle of the story. Well... all I can say is I told ya so, with an extra note that HN in the past few years has been surprisingly dismissive of FOSS proponents who have been warning about these things.<p>First they made fun of us for saying everything was being spied on, and then Snowden happened. (often followed by bullshit like "are you suprised?" or "what do you have to hide?"<p>Then we warned about proprietary systems, and then NSA/CIA tool leaks happened. (often followed by things like "but its for foreign collection only" and "but the NSA contributes to SElinux")<p>Ya'll aren't listening until after the fact, and that's not going to fix anything.