Many are working to ensure that the software on your laptop is secure. Just this week, Mozilla called for engineers across the globe to audit its open source Firefox web browser, hoping to prove that it hasn’t been compromised by the NSA or anyone else. And you can easily put your faith in an operating system like Linux. It too is open source, with countless eyes constantly looking over its code.
But what about the hardware inside your laptop? What’s going with all those tiny circuits on the motherboard? Or in the firmware that controls the motherboard and other low-level parts? All that is closed source. The rest of the world can’t help you there.