http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/OH/BHUSA09-O...
http://www.phreedom.org/presentations/reverse-engineering-an...
People built businesses around this.
With so many eyeballs on release diffs, undisclosed vulnerable were often discovered (and still are). With the number of experts on file observing this it should not be controversial at all.
I was responding to the Quora link (where the question was "is there any evidence for backdoors in Windows or other client software for the NSA/CIA?")
If 9/11 == inside job is say 2/10 plausible this Quora speculation like 7/10 plausible IMO.
The fact that it got 1.5k upvotes is a great reminder that voting systems aren't a magic wand for solving quality issues. People just love conspiracy theories too much to think critically…
The responder prefaces most of their comment with "it is widely believed that" and "it is likely that", states without any explanation that the Malicious Software Removal Tool is somehow a backdoor, and that "everyone who knows about [the backdoors] is under NDA", with no evidence to support that statement either.