I think your parent didn&#x27;t mean that &quot;JunOS is just software networking on BSD&quot; but that &quot;software networking on BSD is all that can be trusted because NSA screws commercial products&quot;.<p>And of course it doesn&#x27;t have to be NSA. Maybe some foreign spies or pretty much anybody interested in spying on some Juniper&#x27;s customers.<p>Or even a bored employee doing it for bragging rights. FWIW, I once worked for a (reasonably big) corp making software which has to run as root and I&#x27;m pretty sure I&#x27;d have been able to slip some small privilege escalation backdoor in there if I felt like doing so. But I have to admit that their products weren&#x27;t as security critical (and, actually, already had some vulns), so one could hope that Juniper and Cisco are better than that.