Why would anyone bother to LIE to Congress when you can just PAY them instead?

Haven't you heard, congress will do anything, and I mean ANYTHING for money. They don't even make much of a pretense of representing the people any more.

Yes. This can be circumvented. If these people can get around the clear wording of the constitution, then they can do anything.

Black is white. Up is down. Secret courts can issue secret overly broad warrants to secretly spy on everyone all the time. People can be secretly compelled to secretly hand over their secret keys and keep this a secret. People can be compelled to help spy on you and keep this a secret. People can be secretly arrested, and taken to secret prisons. We have secret trials with secret evidence. Defendants are now not even allowed access to the secret evidence against them. I thought I had heard everything when a government official said that their interpretation of the law was secret. (I'm sure they were thinking this keeps the enemy from knowing.)

So yes, these people can go on with business as usual. All they need is a hand waving rationalization to make it all okay.

I strongly agree! We should NOT pay to have our products' security secretly weakened.

The government should do it for free*.

(* just like 'free' public roads, public education, and many other 'free' things from the government)

The NSA would need a logo and branding for such a large advertising and PR campaign as you suggest.

I know! How about Big Brother is Watching You! And the face should, of course, have a smile and a pleasant, re-assuring image.

Funny? Why oh why wasn't your post moded Insightful?

A few decades ago the very existence of NSA was a secret. The CIA had a bad rep.

Now the NSA has a bad rep. So it's time to wind down the importance of NSA and introduce a new sooper dooper sekrit spy agency that can do dirty tricks in the dark without oversight, and especially without pesky annoyances like laws and the constitution. Meanwhile the NSA and CIA can both get all the public bad press, criticism, and 'oversight' of pointy-haired congresscritters.

Linux has one 'survival of the fittest' characteristic that guarantees its long term success. It is open source and has a real community behind it.

To briefly address your other flamebait points:

IBM is not the only major contributor to Linux. Major corporate contributors include lots of well known names. In fact, Linux development is largely corporate contributors.

As for the obvious troll is obvious point about SCO, I would just say that SCO turned out to be little more than a bump in the road. A pimple on the butt of closed source software. Your mention of SCO seems unconnected to what leads in to it.

The EU investigates Apple. And Toyota investigates Hovercars.

Hey now, a C64 can run a small TCP implementation with a Finger daemon.

You could offer the ARM-only and Intel-only APK's on Google Play store, and then offer the larger combined APK file on other stores that do not support processor specific binaries. Make the app version number somehow indicate which one it is, maybe with a one letter value in the version. Then insert these lines into your header files...
#define struct union
#define while if

That argument works both ways. Microsoft has had some very serious security bugs. Therefore, using your logic, all Microsoft software should not now or ever again be trusted. Think Code Red and others. In 1999 on a fully patched NT box you could compromise it with regular HTTP requests to IIS by just using pathnames with dot-dot-backslash and then working your way down the WINDOWS System CMD.EXE and then using it to run TFTP.EXE which was a standard part of the install. You could make the server TFTP down a bad exe from your own server, and then a second carefully crafted Http request to CMD.EXE could execute it for you. Game over.

Microsoft then fixed this by not allowing IIS to accept the dot-dot-backslash business. But you could use percent-sign-hex characters to represent the dot-dot-backslash. Microsoft then fixed that in IIS, but the filesystem would still accept the percent-hex-code characters. So you could double-escape them to get the filesystem to walk you to the CMD.EXE. Eventually they got this right and it was fixed. But there were many other holes. And who's stupid idea was it to run a server process, basically with root privileges?

I could go on. Even recently there was a major IE vulnerability that affected current and past versions.

Heartbleed was one instance of a lapse in security.

> Money saved by the government never translates into money put back in the pocket of the tax payers.

So instead of saving it, the money should just go to vendors?

The money may not go into the pocket of taxpayers, but some or all of it may go into other government expenses. So that $67 million to Microsoft could either lower the budget by $67 million, which you say never happens, and it might not, or it could be spent on other items in the budget. That seems better than wasting it.

> Proper action would be to mandate the government to use the best software for the task at hand.
> That might be open source software. It might be Microsoft software. Let the technical merits decide.

Freedom and cost are technical merits.

Closed source software is not forbidden, just not preferred. If other factors outweigh freedom and cost, then so be it. But if other factors are the same, then freedom and cost seem to be reasonable factors upon which to have a preference.

Microsoft would also never have debug symbols called NSAKEY either. Nope, never.

The Microsoft
Is Your Friend
Trust The Microsoft

Not going to happen.

The distance between Earth and Mars varies widely and Pavement is rigid and non flexible.

The assumption of hotness would instantly disappear upon discovering her true gender.