[diminoten]

I've always understood your comment, what I don't agree with is the need to state it now.

When we make statements, we do so with context, and in this context, stating "the US government could do X" is implying that, yes, in fact the US government did do X.

Furthermore, saying "we don't know they didn't" is a specious argument, at best, because it suggests they did do X, when in reality they're no more likely to have done X, than I am to have done Y, which is some arbitrary other thing which is, while in the realm of possiblity, a complete waste of time to consider.

There exists, within the set of possible things, a set of things which are not among the greater set of things one must consider. The US government secretly forcing GitHub to modify source code in one of their repositories is one of those things that we can safely not consider, even though it is, you're right, technically and politically possible.

[mikekchar]

On the other hand, consider a computer system. If you wish to have a secure computer system, you try to design it in such a way so as to make undesired behaviour impossible. For example, we spend a lot of effort looking at weaknesses in our systems and saying, "Well, someone could overflow this buffer here and get root access". Our reasoning is that if it is possible, it is probably only a matter of time before someone actually exploits it.

So while I completely relate to your feeling of trying to avoid conspiracy theory fantasies of "how do we know they haven't done that", I think it is probably not a good idea to say, "[this] is one of those things that we can safely not consider, even though it is... technically and politically possible".

Whether or not it has happened in the past, we probably don't want it to be possible and we probably should consider to consequences of what would happen if the government decided to take that action. 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,' and all that rot.