Microsoft: No NSA "back door" in Windows 7

Really:

Microsoft has once again denied rumours that it built a backdoor into Windows 7.

Long standing conspiracy theories that Redmond outfits Windows with a covert entry point for law enforcement resurfaced after a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official told Congress it had worked with Redmond on the operating system.

...

Microsoft categorically denied this on Thursday. 'Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows 7," a spokeswoman told Computerworld. "The work being discussed here is purely in conjunction with our Security Compliance Management Toolkit."

A Windows 7 version of the Toolkit, which provides a guide to hardening Windows-based networks, was released last month.

This keeps coming up, every time that there's a new OS. It actually hearkens back to one of the Ancient Scrolls of the computer security field, Ken Thompson's Turing Award speech Reflections On Trusting Trust.

Is there a backdoor in Windows, so that NSA can spy on you? Eric Raymond gave the definitive reply, in a different context:

I would love to be able to echo Charles Babbage and say that I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I find it all too comprehensible, and not in a way that’s very flattering to John Perry Barlow or others like him. It’s a form of posturing by anticipatory martyrdom, simultaneously demonizing Barlow’s enemies and inflating his own importance.

“Oh, look at me!” it says. “I’m a brave speaker of truth to power, so brave that I’m going to say bad things about Republicans despite the fact that they will certainly throw me in the gulags as soon as they think they can get away with it.” I’ve been around long enough to know that this is a line lefties of Barlow’s and my age originally learned in order to pick up women back in those halcyon radical-chic days of forty years ago. It gets a bit old after your third decade of waiting for the Man to bust your door down.

If you really think that the NSA is out to get you, you need to ask yourself a serious question: do you really think that you have the ninja skillz to protect yourself?

Me, I think that NSA has better things to do than sniff around my files. Maybe that's just me. And to Microsoft and "there is absolutely no back door in Windows"? Don't go there: