Remind me to tell you in person some day about how the three-letter agencies waylay shipments of network devices from the manufacturer, install new circuitry and software, before the things get delivered to the customer. "Weird. We overnighted that box to you on Tuesday. You should have had it on Wednesday. Let me check the routing... oh, it's in Memphis, and has been for... 36 hours?!? That's weird."
I think we learned about that because of everything Snowden leaked.
Glad to see it is public knowledge, at least. It was seriously frustrating as a support person, tho. You release a software update that has been tested a bajillion times in every possible scenario... and someone's ADC craps out. Entirely. Unrecoverable. Their business is down. You finally send them another quarter-of-a-million dollar piece of hardware - overnight - and it arrives 4 days later. We had also acquired a small company, and when we assimilated their people into our org, our tech team got the small company's hardware... which included one of our devices. We dug into the device and starting testing it for resell... and it didn't work quite right. We finally got down to looking at the logic board and there were changes that had been made... NOT by us... a chip had been added. Completely black, unlabeled. We never did figure out what it did.
So... at the level above you? Where people "need to know?" One of the other things outlined in Body of Secrets is the revolving-door, industrial-espionage game played by the NSA and the Mossad. Because most large American tech companies provide equipment to the NSA, and because the NSA's charter is explicitly foreign, the NSA has carte blanche to spy on foreign companies, extract their intellectual property, and then "give" it to American companies in exchange for components, designs, parts, etc. Israel is even worse: because they have compulsory service, the IDF filters promising electronics techs into the Mossad, where they learn how to build espionage gear, and then releases them into the private sector where they build components for sale to other countries. One of the reasons we handle Israel with kid gloves is their entire espionage apparatus is basically an annex of the NSA/CIA. So while you have to deal with shipments being intercepted? And the guys on the other line are pissed off? And all your shit keeps breaking for no goddamn reason? Your boss and his boss know what's up.
Yeah. Stuff got weird when you asked too far about why things got held up, or where that ADC with the "weird chip" wound up. "Hey, where's that weird ADC that was in that rack over there?" Never gets a real response, and is eventually dropped from the data center inventory.