I have been holding myself off from writing about NSA and the fiasco surrounding it. Initially, when the news about NSA broke out from Edward Snowden, I was ignorant. I did not want to read some news that leaks out, and I am not a big fan of leaked stories.
But then, as days moved on, and as the news got bigger, I went in and got a full insight of what has been happening behind every citizen of the internet in the past years. While The Verge has a neat storyboard about what the NSA has been doing with all the spied data it has been collecting, the news that Microsoft has been secretly allowing the NSA to spy on the users hit me hard.
The story of Microsoft letting backdoor access to the users’ systems without notifying the users in prior, and letting someone else spy on the users using Windows machines. And the worst part, was that the backdoor access was discovered two years ago by a security researcher, and another security researcher found evidence of the data being given back to the NSA. As Computer World denotes, a large part of the shame goes to the media, for not taking this up seriously, as we do now.
Here’s what the news article about Microsoft mistakenly letting access to the NSA says:
“A careless mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA “help information” trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.”
Now this is getting as bad as it can to Microsoft. The company’s trust has gone down tremendously, and for most part, I have personally lost all the respect I had for the company.
When I thought everything was out, then came the Skype’s architecture change by Microsoft, to allow access to the backdoor people and make snooping easier. And wait, there’s a patent for that too. This report has been confirmed by some of the largest media publishing companies like The Washington Post, The Guardian and many other sites. Here’s what they said:
“In the document, the NSA hails the Prism program as “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA”.
It boasts of what it calls “strong growth” in its use of the Prism program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was “exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype”. There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.”
But wait, this gets ever worse. Bloomberg has reported that the company has been passing information about the bugs that the company gets before it responds to that publicly. And the official confirmation comes from the company’s spokesperson:
“Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, said those releases occur in cooperation with multiple agencies and are designed to give government “an early start” on risk assessment and mitigation.”
Today, the ComputerWorld published an article talking about the trust problem with Microsoft. And this article probably conveyed whatever I wanted to share about this entire issue. Here’s one section of the article which sums up everything:
“At the very least, that risk is yet another good reason never to use Microsoft’s software, along with all the others that I have been writing about here for years. Not just that open source is generally cheaper (especially once you take into account the cost of lock-in that Microsoft software brings with it), better written, faster, more reliable and more secure, but that above all, free software respects its users, placing them firmly in control.”
Well now. I’m not sure what would happen to the company’s reputation going further. But this is such a huge blow for the people who are in love with the company and can’t take any criticism the company faces.
I’m still going to be waiting to see how the entire story unfolds, and I think the story will not have a small and quiet ending.
P.S: Many people have a perception that I am a hard-core Apple fanboy, and I give it a damn about what comes out from Microsoft. They’re wrong. If they know me fully, I was a Microsoft Student Partner, serving the program with all the passion I had for technology. I liked and loved products from Microsoft. But at some point, months after Bill Gates left the company, I thought the company was getting stalled, and I wanted to move on. Where will I jump after that? Well, it has was Apple. And the product I got was the Original iPhone. The point I would like to make here is, I don’t have a hatred for Microsoft, but I just think that the company, built by the man who I admire a lot, is going down. Which was fine, until I heard this terrible news of letting NSA spy its users.