(repeat once)

Or does it?

A whistleblower came forth and stated in a private e-mail, which OpenBSD leader Theo de Raadt published to encourage auditing and removing of the offending code:

My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI. Jason Wright and several other developers were responsible for those backdoors, and you would be well advised to review any and all code commits by Wright as well as the other developers he worked with originating from NETSEC.

This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn’t want to create any derivative products based upon the same.

This is also why several inside FBI folks have been recently advocating the use of OpenBSD for VPN and firewalling implementations in virtualized environments, for example Scott Lowe is a well respected author in virtualization circles who also happens top [sic] be on the FBI payroll

You can read the OpenBSD mailing list post here. A less technical, easier-to-understand article is available on Hacking Expose.

I apologize to every reader of my blog for saying that OpenBSD was free of corporate and government taint. I also applaud Theo de Raadt’s publication of this whistleblowing, and hope that it will not only clean up BSD variants, but finally wake up the open-source sheep that unconditionally support every product, decision, and action connected to the Linux kernel team, the Free Software Foundation, and Google and get some serious reform done.

I’d love to see a new open-source OS in which:

• Donations from active developers only – all external funding is refused.
• BSD or similar permissive licensing is used, so that one will be free of the moneyed Free Software Foundation’s management decisions regarding future license versions. Even if “or at your option, any later version published by the Free Software Foundation” is taken out of the default template, changes in treaty and law (the reason for the GPLv3) would render the project legally stuck and thus still subject to the FSF’s management.
• In order to join the official development team, developers must sign a contract, swearing under penalty of perjury that they are not acting in the interest or on the payrolls of multinational corporations, tax-deductible nonprofits, governments and/or espionage.
• To counteract other distributions and operating systems which exploit the permissive licensing to engage in digital rights management or secret backdoors, the developers would “authorize” uses of the code which are “pure” and “free of corrupt influence”. If needed, the 3-clause “New BSD License” rather than the 2-clause “Simplified BSD License” could be used to prevent fraudulent endorsements.

Until then, assume every operating system and every distribution has been tampered with by the moneyed and powerful.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor predicted Thursday that a case involving WikiLeaks would likely come before the court.

She said that the WikiLeaks “incident,” in which the group posted thousands of classified Afghanistan war documents online, “and others are going to provoke legislation that’s already being discussed in Congress, and so some of it is going to come up before [the Supreme Court.]“

When I read this, I recalled WikiLeaks’ claim that the New York Times was involved:

(Click images for full size.)

The New York Times has claimed involvement in the processing of these memos:

Again, here is the statement from Justice Sotomayor:

She said that the WikiLeaks “incident,” in which the group posted thousands of classified Afghanistan war documents online, “and others are going to provoke legislation that’s already being discussed in Congress, and so some of it is going to come up before [the Supreme Court.]“

Given that the New York Times has a strong left-wing bias, could this also be a pre-engineered vehicle by the Democratic Party to support a massive regulatory change in the Internet?

Keep in mind recent lobbying efforts for a “Drudge tax” on blogs to subsidize the newspaper industry, as well as changes in “fair use” laws so as to require a “copyright license” to quote news material, and proposed propaganda efforts claiming the mainstream media is a “reputable” “public service”.

“The power to tax is the power to destroy” -McCullock v. Maryland, 1819

Pointing out the emperor has given a lap dance to special interests has resulted in things ranging from angry personal attacks to invented hacking reports to my ISP! But now, from talking to the same people, I think more and more people are starting to accept this as truth. It still doesn’t have mainstream acceptance, but I have a feeling it will be. I believe that Slackware Linux and the similar operating system OpenBSD are currently the least tainted with espionage and corporate interests. But Slackware Linux is still Linux, and OpenBSD isn’t very supported, though I don’t condone any corporate or government funding of any kind to OpenBSD, to maintain its purity and reputation.

I’m hoping that more people finally wake up and realize they have been ripped off and sold out by nonprofits which are no different than the corporate counterparts they supposedly oppose.

I have long been an opponent of the 17th Amendment. Ratified in 1913, this gave the American people direct popular election of Senators. Prior to this, Senators were selected by the states (some states held popular elections), as the Senate was designed to represent the state governments, while the House of Representatives would be democratically-elected representatives of the people. This is stated in the Federalist Papers and apparent when you compare the powers of the Senate to the views of the Founding Fathers (e.g. ratification of treaties) . Since the 17th’s ratification in 1913, we have had extensive growth in government, often against the will (or budget) of the state governments (more recently REAL ID, No Child Left Behind, etc.) and a repeal would once again make the Senate subservient to the state governments while keeping the House subservient to the people.

It is written by “Epaminondas” of An Anti-Federalist’s Blog, and has two parts:

Part 1
Part 2

The article is long, but a recommended read.