It’s nice to see this conversation is happening, but I suspect it will be in vain. Electronic security is the kind of thing it only takes one black hat to ruin. There are a lot of black hats, many of them working for our governments. If 99% of engineers agree to play nice, the other one will eat their lunch.
The only solution is “peace through strength.” Strong crypto, strong anti-malware, etc. I guess Norton won’t ever remove the NSA’s back doors, but PGP and TOR seem like they still work, and their creators haven’t been jailed yet. A good strong open-source malware killer would be a blow for liberty - and therefore an act of treason. A nice start would be a free tool to remove the crap that got in via TOR last week - but the programmer would be a hunted ciminal.
