Quite. Assuming that SELinux is secure[1] the NSA's mission should have been to get it as widely adopted as possible, say. Same with GCHQ, it's #1 priority should have been securing the systems of the UK, both public and private sector.
[1] Open source doesn't help here, if the flaw is in the algorithm or the seeds of it.
> Open source doesn't help here, if the flaw is in the algorithm or the seeds of it.
Don't be so cynical about the intelligence of the smart cow. The smart cows were able to figure out that the elliptic curve proposed by NIST was backdoored by the NSA because it was basically choosing public keys to which the NSA had the private keys. The smart cows actually figured this out a long time ago, way before the Snowden leaks. So far, free access to the source has enabled us to find the holes.
> The US and the UK had broken Enigma but had kept this fact secret so that countries would use these broken ciphers.
Does this even count as a 'backdoor'? As much fault as I find with NSA's actions, I think of backdoors as the most malicious form of tradecraft. To me, a backdoor is something that has been specifically designed to allow the NSA, and likely only the NSA, entry, despite it being otherwise secure.
I'm not a crypto guy, so perhaps I'm just looking at this naively, but I think 'broken' and 'backdoor' are two entirely different classes of things.
"The British government insisted upon this silence because it has given the thousands of Enigma machines that it had gathered up after the end of the war to its former colonies as they gained independence and needed secure systems of communication." p 979 The Codebreakers by David Kahn ↩
"The NSA was deeply concerned with the public adoption by Americans of cryptography that they couldn’t break".
Kind of a crazy concept, the agency tasked with our security can't let our own personal security be too high.