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...
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.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 31.5 ms ] threadGranted, 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 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.
"Like anyone else, submit a patch subject to the review of the community... If your backdoor passes scrutiny, it gets in..."