Our conventional military dominance drives our adversaries to cheat, lie and steal. The offensive technical capability to play this game is well within the reach of the principal adversaries of the United States. In fact, one could argue that some of our adversaries are better at this game than we are.

—James Gosler, a fellow at Sandia National Laboratories and a visiting scientist at the National Security Agency

Originally we were saying, “well, whoever got it has the secret sauce to Google and some 30 other California companies, and they can replicate it. But some of the more devious folks in our outfit were saying, “Well, they could also insert their own code — and the probably have.”

–Rick Howard, director of security intelligence at VeriSign iDefense, remarking on the possibility of long-term vulnerabilities through Trojan horses which become part of the release code for applications and systems such as Cisco’s IOS, Adobe’s Flash and Acrobat, among others.