How NSA access was built into Windows

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 10:59:28 -0500,
  Claude Jones <claude_jones at levitjames.com> wrote:
> On Mon January 15 2007 10:40 am, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > One thing I can tell for sure: There is still a noticible group of Linux
> > users in Europe, for whom this incident and the NSA's involvement into
> > SELinux is an argument for "not choosing" Fedora.
> I'm not surprised, and I have heard that myself - in fact, that comes up quite 
> frequently in other forums and lists - I just haven't seen much discussion of 
> it here...

Remember that the NSA also has it as its job to to secure systems. If it
puts in back doors, they are going to be ones that only they can take
advantage of.

SELinux is not something that is going to give them access with its advertised
features, so it is not likely a place where they would try to insert backdoors
(any more than in any other part of the kernel).

Strong encryption is a different issue. They have pretty much given up on
directly outlawing it (though the government did drop the case against DJB
before they lost again at the supreme court). What they seem to be doing now
is putting pressure on businesses not to provide strong encryption for the
masses. Especially in telephony. There is some reason that end to end
encryption isn't standard in digital phones.