Why is Debian not secure by default?

[Rico Secada <coolzone@it.dk>]

Hi.

After having brushed up on some technical aspects of security I would
like to understand why Debian isn't secure be default.

As we all know a lot of security breaches occur because of overflow
errors. Difference protective measurements has been developed for
example such as "executable space protection".

As seen in this list of comparison both Fedora and SUSE are running
with some method of protection enabled by default whereas Debian isn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions#Security_features

Another example is "stack checking" in GCC where for example OpenBSD
ships with this setting as "enabled-by-default" whereas it is
"off-by-default" on Debian.

I would like to understand why Debian is running with this policy of
"security is off by default"?

Kind regards

RS