So the Networking Giant Cisco is denying they have had anything to do with "spying"
on China..
http://www.networkworld.com/...
Cisco denies spying
Says it is not involved in NSA surveillance program or in Chinese espionage
Cisco claims no participation in the NSA spying program in the U.S., or in engaging in espionage in China, according to this post in China Daily. In a statement to the website, Cisco said "PRISM is not a Cisco program and Cisco networks did not participate in the program."
PRISM is the NSA's top secret electronic surveillance program, in place since 2007, and exposed recently by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In the same statement to China Daily, Cisco said it does not monitor communications of private citizens or government organizations in China or anywhere in the world, according to the post.
Cisco and China have had a stand-off since Congress blasted Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese telecommunications companies as national-security threats to the U.S.
Let me tell you what we have here is a failure to communicate.........
It's not a bug it's not a "back door" secret. "Spying" is a feature and a well documented one...
In the early 90's when Personal Computer Networking technology had migrated from Coaxial "Cable TV" like Cable to the modern Unshielded Twisted Pair Cables. The Cable connectors looked like connectors you see on telephone cables but super-sized. These cables plugged into a device called a Ethernet hub. Now in that configuration it was possible to plug a portable computer into a unused slot and run a program called a packet analyzer a device for recording and later analyzing all the traffic on the network in question. This is because a hub was dumb any data going in one connection would come out the others. It was the job of the network card to throw away anything that was not meant for that computer.
By the mid 90's these hubs started getting "brains" and were called switches. Now the only data coming out of a given connection destined for a computer that was plugged into that connection. So now how do you diagnose a problem if you can't see? Well the makers of industrial or non home use network equipment came up with a solution called Port Mirroring.
Port mirroring is used on a network switch to send a copy of network packets seen on one switch port (or an entire VLAN) to a network monitoring connection on another switch port. This is commonly used for network appliances that require monitoring of network traffic, such as an intrusion detection system, passive probe or real user monitoring (RUM) technology that is used to support application performance management (APM). Port mirroring on a Cisco Systems switch is generally referred to as Switched Port ANalyzer (SPAN) or Remote Switched Port ANalyzer (RSPAN); some other vendors have other names for it, such as Roving Analysis Port (RAP) on 3Com switches.
Network engineers or administrators use port mirroring to analyze and debug data or diagnose errors on a network. It helps the administrator keep a close eye on network performance and will alert them when problems occur. It can be used to mirror either inbound or outbound traffic (or both) on single or multiple interfaces.
So with a few commands into the brain of the switch data ends up in two places at the same time. But hey
we told you about it so it's not a bug it's a feature.....
Yep more obfuscation from the tech giants.