SIM card company Gemalto says cards are safe from NSA hack, Snowden disagrees

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- Gemalto, the world's largest SIM card manufacturer, says the NSA and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have not compromised their SIM cards, but Edward Snowden disagrees.

The company has been investigating the claim British intelligence and the NSA had stolen their encryption keys to gain access to phones, which was brought forward by an Edward Snowden leak published by The Intercept. They've just announced no such thing happened, but a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" conversation featuring Snowden on Monday shows him saying people shouldn't believe them.

"Initial conclusions already indicate that Gemalto SIM products (as well as banking cards, passports and other products and platforms) are secure," the company said in a statement, also announcing it will release more information during a press conference on Wednesday.

A Reddit user said they found little reason to believe the company, to which Snowden replied:

"I wouldn't believe them either. When we're talking about how to weight reliability between specific government documents detailing specific Gemalto employees and systems (and tittering about how badly they've been owned) against a pretty breezy and insubstantial press release from a corporation whose stock lost 500,000,000 EUR in value in a single day, post-report, I know which side I come down on."

Gemalto produces over two billion SIM cards a year, including for the four major cell phone carriers in the United States.