US government pushed tech firms to hand over source code

I assure the Feds don 'think get the source code. Vast swaths of leadership in government are unaware there is a difference between compiled code and source.

I'd bet that no one inside Microsoft has access to the full source. Or if so, it's one or two engineers in charge of doing builds.

Not a single person inside Microsoft would have access to it either, because some parts of the system have other companies' trade secrets, like HDCP keys or hardware drivers.

Documentation and getting to build/use it feels to me like support, and I feel that needs to be billable. The source code is the raw product, which is also of value/crown jewels. But it is easier to give it to someone, then to support it.

So can the government force companies to assist them and to what extent? From the article it is suggested that Dell, Huawei, and Juniper have already done so.

But how where they compensated, because engineering time is not cheap, or where they given software backdoors and told to integrate them.

I don't think we will ever know. But would be interesting to know how managers had to explain to the bean counters, that limited resources was spent on project "top secret" instead of a real project making money.

It's hard and really expensive, I don't think any big company would like to do that. For large shops, source code building is non-trivial. It may require proprietary toolchains, metadata stored in some other dbs, or specific hardware / environments. And the toolchain may even not work outside the shop, e.g., depending on internal infras.

Afair Lavabit handed over the private key. It was shut down subsequently to avoid user compromise.

This is one of the oldest conspiracy theories on the Internet. It has been comprehensively and repeatedly debunked. It doesn't even make sense as a backdoor, given its function. Here's the best link on HN about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9297787

You also didn't need the source code to find it; you could have found it with "strings".

That was just a naming convention. When asked why it was called NSAKEY, Microsoft said this:

>This is simply an unfortunate name. The NSA performs the technical review for all US cryptographic export requests. The keys in question are the ones that allow us to ensure compliance with the NSA's technical review. Therefore, they came to be known within Microsoft as "the NSA keys", and this was used as a variable name for one of the keys. However, Microsoft holds these keys and does not share them with anyone, including the NSA.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Wow.. How come nobody is bringing THIS up whenever the FBI tries to assure us that the bypass they want from Apple will never get leaked into the wrong hands?

... or voting machines. I must say I don't particularly like the rather unpleasant arguments that almost make themselves from those particular facts. That money indeed is considered more important than both safety and fair voting.

Stallman looks more and more prescient every day.