Snowden and Compilers

[dan at geer.org]

 > Way before 2010. Couple buddies of mine built a backdoor into a network
 > card circa 2003. Ditto a SCSI card, loading via the BIOS at boot and
 > injecting itself in several stages via the bootloader into the kernel.

So, to get down to brass tacks: If I can get to the chip mask pre
lithography, how many gates do I need?  A thousand for a kill switch
and three thousand for a connection?

--dan