FTC Issues Letters to Big Tech: No Back Doors

General
1
1 Like
2

I thought using Librem 5 as my daily driver would give me ultimate piece of mind. It gives me a little piece of mind, but ultimately it just confirms my suspicion that I was right to be concerned about our tech.

Once I’ve seen too much, I read an article like this and think:

  • The US government is totally bluffing to sound good and has probably compromised the security of almost all GNU devices twenty years ago with an unpublished back door I will never know about, so this stuff they’re saying now for show feels somewhat trollish [am I just paranoid?]
  • Purism touting how perfect their stuff is also has a bias where in reality I think I might go email Purism support tonight about a hardware issue that I was having, and when I do that it creates data that Purism has to decide what to do with even when they claim to store no data
  • These problems have no end. Lots of good faith people, and a few bad faith people. Sometimes the bad faith people are the ones in power making the decisions. Especially in the government[s] of the world; we seem to have a knack for selecting the bad ones.
2 Likes
3

Hopefully Purism hasn’t received any letter - not from a dodgy foreign government wanting a back door and not from the US government demanding that there not be a back door. However Purism has a “warrant canary” that purports to tell us by omission if an unpleasant letter (i.e. of the former type) is received.

It is difficult to have a secret back door in open source. It is certainly possible for it to be overlooked but a back door is at least in principle discoverable by examination.

It was my impression that there was an element of bluster in the FTC letter (the letter is linked from the Purism blog post). It remains to be seen what the upshot is.

1 Like
4

I think it is more likely that the social collective will fail to examine/discover these. I did not mean to suggest that Purism has been specifically approached by a government entity telling them to add a specific back door. I doubt doing so is necessary, nor worth the time, of the people who know about the real back doors.

(Cast a small net and you catch a few fish, cast a wide net and you catch all fish on Earth at the same time)

1 Like