If not for the fact that "NSA=big brother" is a trending story outside of highly techy circles, I would think this article was a piece of satire. Even its main point that it can quote them saying the NSA's code tries to be invisible to apps and users doesn't mean anything, because, that is the point, to transparrently offer increased security without inconveniencing everyone.
If the NSA wanted to slip a back door into the kernel, they would do something much more sneaky, such that it looks like an innocent mistake in some random part of the code.
After all NSA has some of the brightest minds on its payroll and those guys sure know computers better than some people know the back of their hands.
But do the non-tech users and tech users (who are not great at programming) have a choice? We have to use what is available in the market if we want to use computers.
The author notes that all of the SELinux code is open-source, but appears to believe that the NSA is capable of writing backdoor code that eludes extensive auditing by the entire world's security community.
In other words, this site is Timecube for techies.
I'd be a lot more concerned about the many instances of NSA contributing code we don't know about and can't inspect than I am about their contributing to open-source, which I consider a good thing.
Of course, there is not much doubt that anything you send through Google is going to be accessible to the NSA - eg, Google Play, Gmail, push notifications, etc. And if you're in the USA, anything you send through AT&T etc.
