A brief history of one line fixes
> What do all these earlier mistakes have in common, apart from the obvious: being exemplars of “catastrophic loss of structural integrity”? They all date from before 2013. That’s how we know the NSA wasn’t involved.<p>I get that this is trying to make fun of the response to  Apple's "goto fail;", but this logic ("These similar errors predate 2013 → Apple's similar error was not an NSA backdoor") seems rather faulty. There are a number of flaws with this line of reasoning. To name a few:<p>* The NSA could have been involved with backdoors before 2013 (unlikely in Debian, but mentioning 2013 is a bit of a red herring)<p>* Apple could have been encouraged to insert a backdoor and did so in a way that gave them plausible deniability (either because the NSA specified that, or because they wanted to cover their behinds)<p>Whether or not this incident was the result of the NSA's prompting is something we'll probably never know[0], but this article doesn't do much to argue one way or the other.<p>[0] The only way we could know is if someone literally came out and admitted it (or someone like Snowden were to leak it). It's possible to prove the existence of something (ie, a backdoor attempt), but impossible to prove the absence of something.