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Schwartz Comments On NSA/Sun OpenSolaris Collaboration
sean_nestor writes to mention that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz took a bit of time recently to comment on last week's announcement that Sun Microsystems would be partnering closely with the NSA for security research surrounding OpenSolaris. Rather than the typical loads of legalese and confidentiality agreements Sun and the NSA are claiming that this move is more about the NSA joining the OpenSolaris community than anything else. I guess only time will tell.
[disclaimer - I work for Sun, and I KNOW that some of my friends have worked for the NSA, and I KNOW that I have relatives with security clearances. Who knows what's going on that I don't know.] As has been pointed out elsewhere, if the NSA wanted to insert backdoors in software, it is not likely that they would announce it loudly. Ditto for anyone other country's version of the NSA. There is a legitimate national security reason that the NSA would be interested in plugging holes in software that is widely-used within the US -- as bad as worms/spam etc might be, imagine how it would turn out if a nation decided to launch some sort of a cyber attack, concurrent with who knows what other action. That's bad news that we just don't need to hear. As far as the compiler goes, ab-so-lutely, be wary.