How NSA access was built into Windows

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 16 January 2007 11:47, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

[...]

>Remember that the NSA also has it as its job to to secure systems. If it
>puts in back doors, they are going to be ones that only they can take
>advantage of.
>
>SELinux is not something that is going to give them access with its
> advertised features, so it is not likely a place where they would try
> to insert backdoors (any more than in any other part of the kernel).
>
>Strong encryption is a different issue. They have pretty much given up
> on directly outlawing it (though the government did drop the case
> against DJB before they lost again at the supreme court).

Which they would have (lost that is), and that would have left a lot of 
people with egg on their faces.

> What they 
> seem to be doing now is putting pressure on businesses not to provide
> strong encryption for the masses. Especially in telephony. There is
> some reason that end to end encryption isn't standard in digital
> phones.

That, from an engineering standpoint, is far more likely to be a 
consideration of latency and power consumption than in the difficulty of 
doing it.  Strong encryption is both power hungry, and slow.  No one 
would long tolerate a cellphone that only had 15 minutes talk time, and 
wasted 2-3 seconds for each turnaround in the conversation and cost $50 
more than one without it because of the royalty payments such a device 
might incur.  We are all too darned used to the instantainious(sp) nature 
of the analog phone.

Even skype's delays bug the heck out of me.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.