US Government Pushed Many Tech Firms To Hand Over Source Code (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Apple isn't the only company that has been asked to hand over the source code of its operating system. In an effort to find security flaws that could be used for surveillance or investigations, the U.S. government has made numerous attempts to obtain the source code from other tech companies. From the ZDNet report, "The government has demanded source code in civil cases filed under seal but also by seeking clandestine rulings authorized under the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a person with direct knowledge of these demands told ZDNet. The Justice Department wanted to draw outrage, painting Apple as the criminal. With these hearings held in secret and away from the public gaze, the person said that the tech companies hit by these demands are losing 'most of the time.'"

Comments

I Goes Deeper Than That, Folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple isn't the only company that has been asked to hand over the source code of its operating system.

I heard that even Linux had to hand over the source code of its operating system.

They asked for the linux kernel

[GuB-42]

The US government repeatedly asked Linus Torvalds for the source code of Linux.
I heard they are pretty pissed off, something about being called "git" if I remember correctly.

A solution: the government will never read my cod

[raymorris]

I have a solution to this. Most of my code can never be read by the government, or anyone else I don't want reading it.

I've made that impossible, by writing it in -Perl-, with page-long regular expressions. :) Just try reading my recursive descent parser for almost-html embedded in almost-xml written as a 8,000 character regex, Obama.