Government spooks helped Microsoft build Vista

[John Macdonald]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2007 at 03:55:52PM -0500, James Knott wrote:
> Rick Tomaschuk wrote:
> >Looks like corruption is rife in the US with the NSA allegedly
> >supporting Microsoft. Looks like soon it will be anti-American to not
> >support Microsoft. (Bush-if you're not for us your against us) Now
> >Novell is in with Microsoft. I don't know why I bother to continue to
> >support Novell. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36814
> >
> >Does anyone have suggestions for long term IT strategies that won't land
> >me on a terrorist list? Is RedHat really the only large non-Microsoft
> >shop?
> >RickT
> >
> >  
> Please bear in mind that it is the responsibility of the NSA to ensure 
> software is secure for certain government uses.  Any software that's to 
> be used has to be certified. 
> The list includes Unix, Windows, Netware and many others.  Getting the 
> NSA to say your software is secure, is not selling out.  The NSA 
> produced a secure version of Red Hat a few years ago.

It is also their responsibility to ensure that the U.S. is
capable of getting intelligence from foreign lands.  As Bruce
Schneier points out in his blog (Jan 9 about 10 entries
ago right now http://www.schneier.com/blog/), these two
responsibilities are opposed when they are examining popular
software.  Do they report problems so they can be fixed so
that U.S. government use is safer, or do they leave them in
so they can be used to spy on the rest of the world?

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