[userbinator]

This is why I think reverse-engineering needs to be far more common knowledge; maybe to the extent of being required in a CS curriculum just like going in the other direction (from source code to low-level CPU operation) often is. There is far too much blind trust in things at the "lower level", like compilers and libraries, and while it's much harder for the average person to reverse-engineer hardware and verify its operation (requires specialised hardware too), with software it is relatively easy and should be something that every programmer should know at least a little of.

Of course there's the legal aspects of RE, which often dissuade people from even thinking about or discussing it, but I think that just telling people they could if they really wanted to discover exactly what their software was really doing is already sufficiently empowering. No doubt there would be plenty of opposition to this... which would primarily be from the proponents of DRM and the like, who very strongly want software (and hardware) to be treated as "black boxes". But it is, at least with general-purpose computers, relatively difficult to stop people from examining them, and even more difficult to tell if they did --- which is why I think this knowledge of RE is truly liberating.

Stallman's story is also worth mentioning here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html