Per the eWeek article referenced by salon.com, 'NSA Backdoor Torvalds was also asked if he had ever been approached by the U.S. government to insert a backdoor into Linux. Torvalds responded "no" while nodding his head "yes," as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter.' http://www.eweek.com/developer/linus-torvalds-talks-linux-de...

It's a joke.

Granted, it could be truth wrapped in joke to make it bearable.

But it's impossible to infer from that response that it's supposed to be taken seriously or contain even a grain of truth.

A real journalist would have, oh, I don't know ... tried to contact Torvalds and ask for clarification?

I wonder how that conversation went?...

"Like anyone else, submit a patch subject to the review of the community... If your backdoor passes scrutiny, it gets in..."

The response was meant to be a joke but the question was pretty legit and left somewhat unanswered.

I think it was about 5-6 years ago but there was a case where a backdoor was hacked into the source code, it was pretty subtle for a change but was caught because of how it was done.

Isn't it very hard to do it without noticing in such a huge OSS project like linux? So many people keep their eyes on changes.