content: Sometime ago, a some NSA guy said that it is not impossible to snoop on Linux users. And they do.  Anyone who says that anything is, in practice, hack proof, is probably full of crap.  It's kind of like what happens when you declare a ship unsinkable; in most cases, you will come to rue those words. There are a lot of people who insist Linux is as bad as Windows.  Frankly, I don't believe that.  But it also is no panacea.  I wish people would stop believing it was; it is a great improvement for privacy, but there are limits.  And I can gurantee that code scrutinization is a Herculean task and 99.9% of Linux users never look at the code before installing, even the source code based distros like Gentoo.  I have no idea of how many millions of lines of code there are in a typical Linux distribution.  At least on the order of several tens of millions.  I would assume over a hundred million easily.  You could spend a lifetime trying to audit that much code by yourself.  OSS has many benefits, but unless you are interested in a specific portion of all that code, the end user being able to (theoretically) verify the software themselves is almost certainly not one of them.  I am like pretty sure that Lenart Pottering (you piece of shit) is being paid millions to disrupt the Linux community and introducing unnecessary complexity just so that NSA can exploit it.  I doubt it.  IMO, there are other forces in play here, and I suspect that something foul is going on with the way it's being shoved down everyone's throats even though it seems like almost everyone utterly loathes it who isn't a distribution developer.  That said, that might just make the job easier for anyone who wants to get into your computer, because all they have to do is sit back and watch for vulnerabilities to spring up in the new code.  And above all, there are binary blobs in the firmware.  This is a huge problem with Intel.  Unfortunately it will be some time before open source hardware becomes really practical, unless you're willing to go with considerably weaker CPUs (which, with current computing hardware, is sometimes just fine; a CHIP works fine for simple office tasks, for instance, and the whole thing is $10 or so).  LibreBoot was arguably a step in the right direction, but aside from being politicized up the wazoo, it's not enough, and I don't even think it necessarily works with modern hardware anyway, which makes its utility somewhat limited.  That said, if Intel's secrets on their firmware ever make it out into public and we have nearly undefeatable hacking tools spreading like mad, this business is going to get really nasty for them, really quickly.  Corporations and the government are extremely powerful, but not omnipotent, and the sudden outrage of literally almost everyone who uses a computer (or used what is now a paperweight) might be enough to change things dramatically.