Tl;dr the argument is if three letter agencies can’t buy or make exploits anymore because all vulnerabilities are patched, they will ramp up legal and legislati

Tl;dr the argument is if three letter agencies can’t buy or make exploits anymore because all vulnerabilities are patched, they will ramp up legal and legislative pressure to make vendors install backdoors. Which is bad and we should all worry about. 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.