In reply to John Gilmore.

John,

My apologies again for the delay in responding. I somehow didn't see this post and found it after your followup.

As I noted in all of my responses, and in response to your follow up question (thanks for posting that btw) - we don't help the U.S. government (or any government) to deliberately weaken or compromise our products. This includes what might be considered indirect ways.

About the premise behind your question: that Cisco cannot export products, unless it hands over its source code to a USG agency. We are not required to hand over our source code to anyone for export-related reasons, actually, nor did we. We are under no requirement to provide source code to the NSA (or another agency connected) to secure export approval. U.S. export controls are about ensuring specific technologies are not available to unauthorized countries or organizations. We definitely have to file a lot of paperwork (and that's not much fun btw), and sometimes talk to representatives of organizations, to gain permission, but we don't need to hand the code over, or give access to it.

For Cisco, more information on these technologies and restricted export locations can be found here:

www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/global_export_trade/deemed_exports/controlled_technology.html

You correctly noted that Cisco has many customers outside the United States. In the first quarter of Cisco's FY14, for example, customers outside the Americas contributed 39% of our revenue. The remaining 61% included U.S. customers, but also customers of other North and South American countries. Given this global profile, we clearly know how important non-U.S. customers are to our overall business. And just like our U.S.-based customers, these organizations rely on the integrity of Cisco's products and us as a trustworthy vendor. We know that, and take it with the utmost seriousness.

So I feel like a broken record, and am running out ways to say this and only hope that our back and forth is helping: Cisco does not work with any government to weaken our products, nor are we compelled to do so for any reason. Our interest is in supporting our customers (regardless of where they are located) and continuing to strengthen our products against any sort of compromise.

hope this helps, and again, sorry for missing the original post. Good question.

-jns