I wonder if the NSA will open source their server architecture?
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux#Overvie...
SELinux, however, prevented the TFTP transfer from happening. We saw this in the audit logs, investigated, and discovered what had happened (and, of course, updated the PHP application).
If the attack had succeeded, I'm convinced that it eventually would have ended up as a full ("root-level") compromise.
How can anyone find them credible in such a role with such huge glaring conflicts of interests, and their demonstrated lack of trustworthiness?
Just because the DOD bombs civilians with drones in far off doesn't mean we should hold the National Park Service in the same light.
My orignal response was to someone wondering why the NSA can violate constitutional rights while at the same time open sourcing technologies for enhanced securities. My example of the DOD vs the NPS was to show that entities within the same organizational structure can have opposed goals.
And you can just look at the NSA's guide to securing Red Hat Linux.
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf
It's not substantially different than the information you'd find in any other book about security. Anyone is free to review or comment on it. I don't find it plausible that the NSA would hide any tricks in that document so they could track you. At best, they might omit information, such as knowledge of a 0-day exploit.
As far as the NSA's published guide you linked, of course it is in the national interest for them to do things like that, and given the nature of a public document it would be foolish for them to put false or misleading information in it. That would be both bad, and comically obvious. I was thinking more along the lines of them promoting or mandating the use of encryption/technology that has weaknesses known only to them.
For instance, NSA fixed a problem in what became IBM's DES crypto standard before the cryptanalytic community even knew what the attack was. So there's at least evidence that NSA takes that part of their mission goals seriously, and that NSA required the knowledge/skills/abilities of their "other half" in order to properly carry out those duties.
Their trustworthiness on technical matters is a matter of public record--for example, as far as I know, Linux experts independently agree that SELinux is a very secure Linux configuration.