The simplest way to think about the ANT catalog was that it updated the “bugs” that intelligence agents had been putting into telephones since the 1920s. But that misses the scope of what the equipment can pick up from computer networks, and the opportunities for cyberattack. The catalog revealed a new class of hardware with a scale and sophistication that enabled the NSA to get into—and alter data on—computers and networks that their operators thought were completely sealed off from the Internet, and thus impermeable to outside attack. The NSA had even gone to the trouble of setting up two
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