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Given the fact that the NSA targets linux users [0], is it really that far fetched that they could be adding backdoors to CPUs ordered by certain NSA targets?

• gedrap 12y ago
  Well, to be realistic, almost all Linux users are of no actual interest to NSA. All it means is that statistically, someone browsing about encryption is more likely to be thinking about committing a crime. If you count people who go the extra mile to do heavy encryption for privacy reasons, and people who do that to hide crimes... That could be interesting. The Linux Journal is, in some way, an extremist forum - people who are extremely technically advanced. Being extremist doesn't mean that you are a terrorist. Imagine, you have browsing history for every convict for some specific crime and are tasked to derive a scoring formula. You'd probably see that there's a positive correlation between hasBrowsedLinuxJournel and isConvicted. Using Linux doesn't put you on the kill list. It just means you share something in your behavior with people who are of interest to national security. There probably are many more factors like that - shopping patterns, movement patterns, etc. It's just that Linux made the headlines and media took chance to generate some hype.