One of the author’s blind spots here is the concept of “digital sovereignty”. The US is continuing to ban more and more Chinese-made hardware out of fear that the Chinese govt has installed backdoors in them… which you could interpret as an admission that the US does exactly that with American made products. Globalized supply chains are, erm, complex, and few if any companies are really going to be able to achieve “digital sovereignty” with hardware. But with software it’s actually plausible, though obviously hard. Whether or not the feds have actually installed backdoors in Microsoft Outlook, foreign govts are rightly concerned that they have, and are increasingly pushing to avoid US made software for simple national security reasons.
In a nutshell, what I’m saying is “They shouldn’t do either” is at best a platitude and at worst a distraction preventing critical thought.
Governments should behave. I know they don't, but they should, and the population should do everything in their power to force them to. What other choice do we have?
Please demonstrate your powerful faculty of critical thought and explain what we should do instead.
> Thus: over the next two years, major pieces of software are likely to run out of remotely-exploitable bugs.
> While I think this is great, for law enforcement and offensive intelligence agencies, it’s going to be a nightmare.
> So what do we do about it? I honestly have no idea. [...] it’s just occurring to me that we’re on a long greasy slide to a place that will look different than where we are today. [We’re] just going to have to hope that this time we make the right choices.
So is a backdoor worse than a security vulnerability? I don't know but that is what this article is about.