14 DAY TRIAL // With the revelations that the NSA is targeting US and foreign companies, pressuring them into building backdoors into their software and services so that the NSA can spy on customers freely, it's no wonder that trust in US companies is at an all-time low.
This affects security companies in particular, where even a little doubt is bad for business. Most are keeping quiet about it, hoping that the nightmare will soon be over, a feeling the NSA must be familiar with by now.
But some are speaking up. 1Password, a password manager, for example, wants to make it clear that it has not been contacted by the government and that it hasn't built any backdoors or weaknesses into its software.
The company explains that it can't prove that is the case, no one could, but it presents several reasons why it would be very hard to compromise the security of 1Password, either covertly or overtly.
On the one hand, the company has offices in four countries, so any gag order would only cover some of the employees. To get it to keep quiet about a request would require the coordination of agencies in the four countries – Canada, the US, the UK, and the Netherlands.
At the same time, the apps never communicate any private data of any kind to 1Password's servers; everything stays local, making it near impossible for the company to retrieve anything even if it wanted to.
Several other big companies have issued denials. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all said that they did not collaborate with the government to provide backdoors or other means of access to communications.
The same companies denied involvement in the PRISM program, which is said to provide the NSA with direct access to user data from several major US Internet companies, including the three listed above.