So, Linus Torvalds: Did US spooks demand a backdoor in Linux? 'Yes'

Linux supremo Linus Torvalds has jokingly admitted US spooks approached him to put a backdoor in his open-source operating system. During a question-and-answer ‪session ‬at ‪the LinuxCon gathering in New Orleans this week‪, Torvalds ‬and his fellow kernel programmers ‪w‬ere‪ asked by moderator Ric Wheeler whether America's g- …

[Anonymous Coward]

But it would have been better...

...if he'd given us a straight "yes" or "no". You know, of the sort that comes back to bite you later if you've told a lie and then got found out? As it is, he has plausible deniability about lying, because no-one can really decide if he said yes or no.

Or can they? Anyone like to actually commit to whether they thought Torvald's answer meant yes or no?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: But it would have been better...

Didn't you bother to read all our previous splaffs before splaffing that?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's there somewhere in the MAKE script....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Spooks can compromise these supposedly secure communications by gaining access to the root certificates and encryption keys"

That would only be if the CA allowed it. A company could very easy run their own PKI infrastructure and thus not need the use of a CA. Then the spooks wouldn't have access to the root certificates nor the encryption keys.

[Nym]

Um...about comments here:

Don't worry about it unless you're about to compromise yourself, unless you've had a high security clearance, at which point you find out the rules--I wasn't actually discharged from the Navy. HP in the early 90s was quietly told to put back doors in all internet servers just like Cisco did; it hit the news once that I saw. Backdoor=command level password & hardware, no details were given.