Linux creator admits NSA demanded backdoor

Per the eWeek article referenced by salon.com, 'NSA Backdoor Torvalds was also asked if he had ever been approached by the U.S. government to insert a backdoor into Linux. Torvalds responded "no" while nodding his head "yes," as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter.' http://www.eweek.com/developer/linus-torvalds-talks-linux-de...

It's a joke.

Granted, it could be truth wrapped in joke to make it bearable.

But it's impossible to infer from that response that it's supposed to be taken seriously or contain even a grain of truth.

A real journalist would have, oh, I don't know ... tried to contact Torvalds and ask for clarification?

I wonder how that conversation went?...

"Like anyone else, submit a patch subject to the review of the community... If your backdoor passes scrutiny, it gets in..."

The response was meant to be a joke but the question was pretty legit and left somewhat unanswered.

I think it was about 5-6 years ago but there was a case where a backdoor was hacked into the source code, it was pretty subtle for a change but was caught because of how it was done.

Isn't it very hard to do it without noticing in such a huge OSS project like linux? So many people keep their eyes on changes.