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Comment by whydoyoucare | Hacker News Reader

How would code-signing help if NSA arm-twists you into introducing a backdoor in your code? Even for open-source, it is difficult for average-Joe to trace and figure out contributions (its like saying the automobile engine has blueprints available, so everyone should be able to figure out what's wrong). :-)

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Arm-twist?

You know NSA is an American Agency, and America is not China - there is a free enterprise. The only way they can "arm-twist" you is by rules and regulations that every company has to follow. In other words - NSA cannot force you to break the law.

"The FBI wanted to work out an arrangement in which the developer would secretly feed its operatives information about Telegram’s inner workings—things like new features and other components of the service’s architecture that they might want to know about. The arrangement would be strictly confidential, and they were willing to pay." source: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine

Whats your point? Telegram owners are private enterprise. They could say "okay we do it for money", or say "we won't do it because of principles".

Where is this so-called "arm-twisting" ??

>What is a metaphor the post

Even if it wasn't a metaphor the US has been known to physically harass people for Software more than any other regardless of what the people did.

Us government has been _physically_ harras people for software?

Some examples please?

Isn't it ironic how the majority of threads on this forum currently discuss the abuse of power of government officials and the excessive violence of countless law enforcement agencies, while this thread abounds in commenters conspicuously ignorant of the problem?

I'm not being ignorant. I am simply asking question - what are examples of government physically harassing software people?

Unless what you saying is that some programmer neck was crushed for 8 minutes because they didn't want to implement backdoor??

Bribing the software engineers of an independent private business behind the owner's back, and/or showing up without announcement at private residences of major stake-holders is "arm-twisting" for all intents and purposes. Admittedly it's more subtle than the typical approach the Russian or Chinese governments would follow, yet the essence is the same. In rare cases, where bribery and coercion fail, there is the institution of FISA courts in the US and the lack of control over secret services in other countries. The potential of a private business to say "okay we do it for money" is exactly the risk at hand and the reason for more than a handful of "accidental" security breaches in the recent past.

This is an ok thing for some Americans to believe in, but at least Google encrypted all its traffic between data centers specifically to avoid NSA eavesdropping. And many people in the rest of the world don’t think US respects the rule of law as it advertizes.

Google encrypted it after Snowden documents revealed NSA was silently exfiltrating the data. [1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

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