It was trivial to review and match the setup imposed by security enhanced Linux as it was open source and for its time, well documented.

no conspiracy other than it guided otherwise ignorant folks on what hardening a system could look like.

Tor is mostly funded by the US government too. It's still amazing software, and even CIA and FBI agents use it iirc.

Even though the NSA sits on a trove of zero day vulnerabilities, they still need to ensure their systems (and by some extension, America's systems) are actually secure.

They also developed Ghidra which is a fantastic reverse engineering tool.

SELinux and Tor aren't a super duper secret fed backdoor, they're FOSS security software that gains a lot of benefit for being open source.

If you want an actual backdoor that the NSA has conventiently abused before, look at the Intel management engine CVEs which Snowdon exposed they had made several custom implants for.

Or the classic 2017 Windows Eternal Blue exploit which the NSA admitted to holding on to for 5 years even though the rumor is they probably discovered it back in the Windows XP era lol.

They designed it because they wanted it to secure their own systems. Think about that. If you aren't using selinux full out the NSA and their counter-parts in other countries can get into your shit. Probably

The NSA also does a lot of work with regards to computer security

SElinux/MAC are fantastic tools that can be used to lock down a system. Android largely hasn't been impacted by many of the severe Linux vulnerabilities due to SElinux

NSA has a dual mandate, they do both offense and defense. It leads to conflicts…

They also develop and maintain Ghidra, which is also open source.

watchers don't like to be watched

US Navel Intelligence made Tor originally

A few years back I was talking to an acquaintance that worked in the NSA for about a decade, he was far to casual when he said "Oh, yeah we have back doors in Linux and all over the open source world that haven't been discovered.".

I mean, yeah, that tracks but did he have to be so proud of his achievement. He was one of those, 'see if it can be done don't question if it should' kind of people.

I suppose it is a part of their NOBUS "NObody But US" strategy but with the code being in the open, that is a dangerous game to play with it being discovered by others. Nowadays with LLM's able to do mass analysis of code, I do wonder if there is some regrets in putting those things in there?

But also I suspect a lot of it probably needs physical access to the machine as just sending a few packets to a machine probably isn't enough to get it into an executable state.

Either way, interesting guy, wouldn't trust him with anything!

ITT: it's fine, they're from US