Hi.

I'd like some opinions on this video. I've linked to the part about security: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4BfL6jDeXQ#t=10m21s

If a laptop had a hardware or software backdoor, would it be detected and quashed by GNU/Linux?

"all hardware post 2008...might already have backdoors builtin" - would this be in hardware built in American only?

If true, this all sounds very depressing.

Hardware backdoors are designed to not be detectable by the software. Thus, it can't detect it directly.

SOME hardware backdoors use the available hardware (such as network ports) to send/receive data - THIS can be detected by external network monitoring devices, and SOMETIMES can be detected by the same hardware (it depends on whether the promiscuous mode of the ethernet device can also read its own transmissions; if the hardware backdoor prevents it, then it won't be seen).

Software backdoors can be detected and removed from the source code. That doesn't mean it is necessarily easy to detect though.

You need special software to detect hardware backdoors. Software backdoors are usually much easier to detect.

It's true that monitoring the network, you may be able to catch transmissions made by the malware.

The moral is: it would be prudent to consider that you are being monitored at all times and act accordingly. Certainly you should stay up-to-date with security fixes and maintain a basic level of security and encrypt sensitive data using non-NSA algorithms.