> Every “conspiracy” I’ve heard about the NSA and friends turned out to be true And therefore every next thing anyone on the Internet concocted has to be true

> Every “conspiracy” I’ve heard about the NSA and friends turned out to be true And therefore every next thing anyone on the Internet concocted has to be true as well? I get what you're saying though, and I'm well aware of the dual mandate. But you haven't given me anymore reason to believe this particular one, and I find it strange because I've never heard of any company in any country having to give their software to an intelligence agency before being allowed to release only the modified version. Implanting backdoors is not unheard of, but after they had great success with the clipper chip it's usually done without the company in question knowing about it. You say the excuse was to validate some implementation, but in that case Microsoft wouldn't need to publish any modified versions, the nsa would just point out "this contains too strong crypto, can't export this" or "you made a mistake in algo X allowing attack Y". Not "please substitute this dll with our version and better not tell your customers!".