Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft's Cooperation With NSA Either Voluntary, Or Reveals New Legal Tactic

Posted by timothy on from the man-in-the-middle-attack dept.

holy_calamity writes "When Microsoft re-engineered its online services to assist NSA surveillance programs, the company was either acting voluntarily, or under a new kind of court order, reports MIT Technology Review. Existing laws were believed to shelter companies from being forced to modify their systems to aid surveillance, but experts say the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may now have a new interpretation. Microsoft's statement about its cooperation with NSA surveillance doesn't make it clear whether it acted under legal duress, or simply decided that to helping out voluntarily was in its best interest."

4 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Missed an option. by SuricouRaven · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It could be 'voluntary' complience, with the quotemarks. The classic offer-you-can't-refuse approach. Perhaps a government representative just explained that one way or another the NSA was going to get total access, but if MS (or any other company) complied now they could at least deign the taps in a way suited to their infrastructure, whereas resisting the request would result - after a couple of sessions of congress - in a new law mandating an NSA-designed system be installed and probably break half their well-designed systems by forcing centralisation.

    In the UK we used the same approach to compel ISPs to install anti-child-porn filters: The government never actually passed a law mandating ISPs install filtering, they just made it quite clear that they would pass a law if the industry didn't collectively do so 'voluntarily.' This suits the govermnent very well, because it means the filtering list can be maintained by the IWF, an ultra-secretive unaccoutable non-governmental organisation with all the procedural transparency of a lead brick. If they screw up and block wikipedia, no government department gets the blame and no embarassing enquery is launched.

    I'm expecting exactly the same tactic will be used within a few years to pressure ISPs into blocking regular adult pornography too - there's already a major tabloid and a couple of MPs campaigning for it. To protect the children, of course.

  2. Skype! by Tasha26 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The purchase of popular Skype and modification of supernode to ease snooping now makes perfect sense. MS is just a front for NSA spying!

  3. Re:Microsoft is a business. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah, put Linux on it.
    For your reading amusement during the installation:

    http://www.redhat.com/workshop/defense/agenda/

    Panelists:
    Neil Ziring: Technical Director, NSA Information Assurance Directorate
    Al Holt: Technical Director, NTOC, NSA
    Terry Sherryl: DISA FSO
    David A. Waltermire: Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) Architect, NIST

    It's weird that no one on /. seems to be curious if a corporation that is a leading contributor of OSS sofware with over a billion in revenues each year and a cozy relationship to the US defense sector has been pressured, like Microsoft, to put in backdoors/exploitable vulnerabilites into the Linux kernel or any of their other products. Yes, it's open source, but who audits the code? Supposedly each commit is signed off by another kernel dev. However, in most cases you have one developer signing off on commits of another developer from the same organization. Most times its just rubber-stamp procedure. Given that Linux is used across the world, it seems highly unlikely that the US government would only put pressure on proprietary software and services companies to comply with its demands to make their products easier for them to bypass?

  4. Re:The demise of an empire by MasterOfMagic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As an American who loves my country, I need to have the courage to face the reality --- that my country has ceased to be the land of the free, the home of the braves, but has turned into an empire which is moving towards oblivion

    Not to be too glib, but the braves died out long ago under the watch of Andrew Jackson.

    I have a serious question for you: why do you love your country? I can understand why one could love the ideals that your country was founded upon as they are beautiful. I can understanding wanting to get involved in politics to try and steer the country in a direction that you think is better than where it is now. Why a love of country, especially a country that has been doing immoral things for quite some time?

    The last moral war the US fought, in my estimation, was World War II. It was declared by Congress, and the entire nation sacrificed for it. There was a draft. People left their comfortable jobs and went off to defend the world against tyranny, oppression, and genocide. There was a defined end goal.

    Korea certainly did not fit that bill. Our entrance into Vietnam was based on lies. Beruit was Reagan trying to take the focus off Iran-Contra. The First Iraq War was based on lies and oil. Afghanistan was perhaps justified (though by no means moral, in my estimation). The Second Iraq War was also based on lies and oil.

    The CIA has a track record of overthrowing democratically elected leaders if they judge them not in the best interests of the US. Remember the Iraninan hostage crisis? That was a response to the CIA reinstalling the Shah. Remember Saddam Hussein? The US put him in power.

    Ever since the creation of the NSA and Hoover's reign at the FBI there has been spying on American citizens. Do not think that PRISM is new. The intelligence agencies have been making incremental gains towards it since the Red Scare. The biggest gain of all was convincing the public that CALEA compliance was important (that is, remote, digitally tappable equipment providing both voice and data flowing over the lines).

    So, given all of that, why do you love your country?