Food for Thought
From: 'Rogue State', by William Blum, pages 208-209
QUOTE:
Microsoft
Windows
NSA has done
something similar with computers. In September 1999, leading European
investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA had arranged
with Microsoft to insert special "keys" into Windows software, in
all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist,
Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled
parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking
gun-Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging
symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the
code were the labels for two keys. One was called "KEY". The other
was called "NSAKEY". Fernandez presented his finding at a
conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance.
The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their
software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it
had been put there without users' knowledge. Fernandez says that
NSA's "back door" in the world's most commonly used operating
system makes it "orders of magnitude easier for the US government to
access your computer."20
In February 2000, it was disclosed that the
Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French
Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted
that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software.
According to the DAS report, "it would seem that the creation of
Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA,
and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating
system by the same administration." The report stated that there had
been a "strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent
rumors about the existence of spy programmers on Microsoft, and by the
presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams." The
Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft's biggest client in the
world.21
:UNQUOTE
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