<i>Is Linux under the control of the USA gov?</i><p>Probably not? I could think of ways to hide the controls but the most likely targets would be Linux forks and firmware that run in cell phones, cars, appliances, IoT's, etc... Those are more likely to be in the path of monitoring something <i>interesting.</i> Even in the case of cell phones, cars, etc, I would expect the control to be in firmware that one could tickle with JTAG <i>over bluetooth, USB, WiFi, LoRa</i> to take full control of the OS and bypass all security controls rendering encryption into a placebo or a CPU warmer. Why waste processing cycles on brute forcing when you can tell the application that the encryption key was successfully decrypted without ever even looking at the key.<p>I guess a simpler way to say that is, why control Linux when there are always so many proprietary things are in the path that only have a handful of people controlling them, especially when one could replace said people whereas replacing all the Linux developers would be hard. Firmware that provides a CPU ring -4 shell can bypass absolutely every security control anyone could imagine in microseconds.