I agree with your point: the Times and The Guardian should avoid getting shut down over "helping the enemy".
However, some folks will want to know what's compromised to avoid becoming part of the collateral damage. I do, for example. Some other folks would like to know this in order to do some Forensic Economics. Like the mid-50s Central American coups, I imagine insiders could profit off this sort of thing in a big way.
It would be nice to know if the NSA has pushed Microsoft products solely because of the ability to influence weird little design decisions that could become trapdoors. That way, we could relieve the Linux people's big question about why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" never arrived.
The year of the Linux Desktop for me was 2004... It doesn't arrive at the same point in time for everybody, but the NSA had very little to do with it arriving for me.
The NSA does not hold control over the purchasing decisions made in countless governments and companies all over the world, for that to be a legitimate worry you'd have to show that in America linux was used substantially less where it should have been used compared to other countries. I doubt you could make that case convincingly.
However, some folks will want to know what's compromised to avoid becoming part of the collateral damage. I do, for example. Some other folks would like to know this in order to do some Forensic Economics. Like the mid-50s Central American coups, I imagine insiders could profit off this sort of thing in a big way.
It would be nice to know if the NSA has pushed Microsoft products solely because of the ability to influence weird little design decisions that could become trapdoors. That way, we could relieve the Linux people's big question about why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" never arrived.