[Info-vax] Have the NSA planted backdoors in VMS ?

[brendan welch]

I brought the subject up here, probably about 1995.
I was absolutely a neophyte, but surprisingly had
read an article about the subject which all the rest of
comp.os.vms had missed.

I am now not successful in Googling back to what I wrote.
Even at the time I could not remember where I had read
the article, but it probably was in the  business pages
of the Boston Globe newspaper, the major New England
publisher (and my children had all been "paper-boys"
for them).
But I recall that the article COULD have appeared in one
of the DEC-related magazines, but then it would have been
even more unlikely that the veterans of c.o.v would
have missed it.

I was unable to satisfactorily answer any questions
from the more illustrious users here.

It was not even called a backdoor then.  As written,
the article simply postulated the possibility that
an employee at DEC might have inserted the ability
of using a second, fantastically-secret system password,
and that this might have been done, or could have been
done, for the payment amount of $100,000.

I do not remember if the article was slanted toward
the payer being business-oriented (e.g. Mafia) or
government (e.g. CIA).