Trust but Verify
This is good and necessary, but I see this as mostly symbolic.  In practical terms, coercing a browser vendor into modifying their binaries to add an exploit is a comparatively risky and difficult way for the NSA to get a backdoor.  There are much less-risky ways for the NSA to get an exploit.  To wit:<p>1) All browser vendors keep a private catalog of security-critical bugs.  If the NSA cared to gain access to these, they could, with or without the cooperation of the vendor.<p>2) The NSA maintains its own catalog of zero-days in browsers, operating systems, Flash, Acrobat, and so on.  They actively exploit these bugs in  attacks targeted against individuals.  That these attacks are delivered only to their intended targets makes the bugs essentially impossible for browser developers to detect and fix, until they're independently discovered.<p>3) NSA can add exploits to source.  Compared to coercing a vendor into adding an exploit into their binaries, this has the advantage of being easy to pull off without the vendor's knowledge or cooperation.<p>In terms of Firefox specifically, the safeguards in place are not sufficient to prevent a determined adversary from committing a backdoor into the source.  Code review can't catch all security-critical bugs, and anyway Mozilla committers regularly check in code which doesn't match the reviewed code; it would be easy to slip in an exploit after review.<p>I suspect something similar applies to other browsers.  A browser's being OSS only makes the NSA's job of adding exploits marginally easier; there's nothing stopping the NSA from planting engineers on the IE team, for example.<p>4) The NSA could use its targeted attack ability to deliver backdoored binaries to specific targets.  Even if Mozilla protects downloads with a pinned SSL cert, I have to believe that stealing or forging a cert is not out of the question for the NSA.<p>If I were the NSA, I'd need to observe that none of the above strategies was working before attempting the much more risky job of coercing a browser vendor into adding an exploit into the binaries they distribute.  And we know that at least (2) above /is/ working for the NSA.<p>In other words, if we're serious about securing our browsers against this adversary, we need to think a lot bigger than just verifying that the binaries on our FTP servers match our source.