Update on Windows Snooping

If you happen to be interested in the subject, I ran across something fresh: NSA Collects MS Windows Error Information. The article discusses how the NSA is harvesting any bug report or telemetry sent from your Windows computer back to Microsoft.

This is posted on Bruce Schneier’s blog; I chose to link there instead of the original article he references because of what shows up in the comments section. Someone claiming to be a former employee of Microsoft says this: “When I worked at Microsoft I discovered that the company was curating and feeding NSA this information. This is one of many such internal programs.” Another commenter asks whether this has a specific contract, or if “unrelated contracts are issued quid pro quo for betraying Microsoft customers with unfixed vulns”. The MS commenter says the arrangement is quid pro quo. In other words, everything your Windows computer communicates back to MS is in turn repackaged for the convenience of NSA. It implies that this includes all users of MS Windows worldwide.

This is a very serious claim. I suppose there is almost no way to verify that, but it certainly plays into the hands of a lot of anti-MS folks out there. Here is the link to the original Spiegel story.