Microsoft exec says company has never been asked to backdoor a product

http://threatpost.com/microsoft-exec-says-company-has-never-been-asked-to-backdoor-a-product

 

Here's the video (from the article) at the mark where he says it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG3JSWUhp_E&feature=youtu.be&t=42m31s

He uses the point where if Microsoft did anything to jeopardize the security of their costumers on purpose that they wouldn't be able to sell to anyone. Oh, ok: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/microsoft-says-come-back-warrant-unless-youre-microsoft

You could make that argument for DuckDuckGo or some other privacy based things, because that's their main competitive edge (privacy and security) and if they were to be found doing something fishy they wouldn't last long. Google, Microsoft and others are too large. They have legal teams and money- resources short of a privatized military.

The NSA and the OTHER large companies, well, it's like Carlin would say; businessmen don't even trust each other. That's not to say there aren't types in any organization who might have some values and care about people, but the companies as whole? Yeah, sure they're all great. Disney being a "family image" company has never done anything remotely shady, ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_The_Walt_Disney_Company

Man, I just don't get why people wouldn't trust these conglomerates. Why, they have to maintain their good image! Ahaha!!

 

Sorry but either he is liar or he does not know all the facts.

 

'the FBI, concerned about its ability to fight crime — specifically, child pornography — apparently repeatedly asked Microsoft to put a backdoor in the software.
. . .
Peter Biddle, the head of the engineering team working on BitLocker at the time, revealed to Mashable the exchanges he had with various government agents.
"I was asked multiple times," Biddle told us, confirming that a government agency had inquired about backdoors
. . .
Last week, The New York Times, ProPublica, and The Guardian revealed that one of the ways the NSA circumvents Internet cryptography is to ask companies to put backdoors in their products.

The FBI is reportedly doing the same in the name of fighting crime, and its persuasion techniques appear to be very similar.

According to reports, both the NSA and the FBI are subtle in their requests, which are never formal, written requests, but are usually uttered during casual conversations, almost jokingly'

http://mashable.com/2013/09/11/fbi-microsoft-bitlocker-backdoor/

 

Saying that the company has never been asked to provide a backdoor is more of an evasion than an answer. The company as a whole doesn't need to be asked. A single individual will do, a department head or even an individual coder. "Asked" doesn't include coerced, threatened, blackmailed, etc.

 

LOL Microsoft? The sooner people wake up to the fact, huge companies and lying go hand in hand, the sooner they might see what this is really about. Lying is their stock in trade, whether its because of greed, coercion, fear of threats or whatever, it's still lies. Still, a better question to ask is WHY they are doing this.

 

That's the easy part to answer. Each gives the other what they want. The NSA gets access to everyones PC whenever they want. Microsoft gets a near monopoly with the ability to coerce and dictate to other industries like device, peripheral, and component manufacturers, software vendors, etc without facing anti-trust and anti-monopoly charges. Government and big corporations are for all purposes, one and the same.

 

Well yes, that's part of the reason "why" but it isn't the full conclusion of the matter. I believe I know why they're doing this but I think there's too many that are willfully blind about it in the face of staggering evidence. So I'm thinking more in terms of WHY Govts and big corps are joined together and probably more to the point, where its heading.

 

The answer to that question goes beyond the scope of what is allowed here. I suggest that you look up fascism and its recent history for your answer.

 

So they say, and yet its all connected and the dividing line is all over the place as to whether you might cross over it or not. Also, no need to look anything up for the answer as I have it already, but others may want to take that suggestion up, which is all good.

 

If one looks at all of the electronic devices we currently use to communicate or exchange data, almost all of them track users and record their activities. The portable devices constantly broadcast our location. At present, Windows hasn't yet been proven to be backdoored although the recent events with TrueCrypt and the webpage they left tend to say otherwise.

Yes, it's all connected. The examples are everywhere, but most don't recognize them for what they are. Entire government agencies that exist to regulate specific industries being used to protect those industries from all competition. Example, the FDA. They rubber stamp poisonous drugs while making it illegal to call botanicals medicine. It protects companies like Monsanto from lawsuits against their GMO seeds and approves the use of poison and radiation on our food while "protecting" us from misuse of the term Organic. The bottom line of the oil and gas industries is responsible for several wars and our destroying the governments of nations that don't bow to them. There's so many examples, one could make a book of them, or a nasty blog.

Most it seems either don't want to see what's happening or feel powerless and isolated against it. The last time a major nation went down this road, WWII was the result. Too many say "that can't happen here" while ignoring the blatant similarities. It's a matter of time until the wars being done in our names come home to haunt us.

 

@ noone_particular
In my thinking if I apply the term "backdoored" in:

1/ an overall sense with the criteria of Billy phoning home when he has no need (ie windows (dis)advantage tool ) and
2/ taking every instance of this no matter how big or small into account ...

...then Windows is backdoored. That's why I limit myself as to what I do online. I would no more trust M$ than fly to the moon. All their fancy promises don't hold any weight to me. I most certainly don't trust Apple either, they're all controlled opposition to a degree in that they appear to be at loggerheads but the real story is quite different...of course behind closed doors. NOTHING at all would surprise me with these huge conglomerates.

Things that are connected have a habit of joining at the top and there sure is a "top". Here's a GREAT example of things linking up. Bill Gates is an advocate of depopulation, Ive heard him say as much. ( If I got to speak to him, I'd say how about you leading the way then...) When you cut through all the side issues and endless trails, any honest person will see (evil) Monsanto is working toward this end. That's what GMOs are all about. Now do a search on the Georgia Guidestones and see the agenda of how "they" want the world to be. Its all written in stone. Population 500Mill. Just lovely. Don't need to be a maths student to figure out the implications of that.

People ought to have a red flag waving right in front of their eyeballs but no, the implications may mean too many lifestyle changes or too much effort expended, plus people are so busy with life not realizing a lot of that busyness is by design to keep people chasing their own tails to keep them occupied so they don't see things slip past them. Diversion tactics.

What is sad is that this constant erosion of our privacy isn't noticed if its done in a little by little fashion. One piece of info doesn't matter and so people have short insight and don't think about ALL the pieces adding up. Just recently, as have many others world wide, Ive been fighting a number of things such as smartmeters.... TOOTH AND NAIL. So far Ive managed to thwart their efforts, but the writing is on the wall. They're closing in on on anything organic. Little by little they're putting the screws on, on many fronts. Another one here at the moment is organic milk.

This is all about control.

I agree with what you're saying.

 

I'm inclined to agree that depopulation appears to be the long term goal. In one respect, I can agree that the earth is overpopulated. On the other, I'm sickened by the combination of corporate and government interests making such decisions at the expense of everyone else. They should be the first to go. If one looks at global surveillance from that perspective, consumer electronics is a persons worst enemy. It definitely suggests a motive for the extent of the surveillance.

I've used Windows since 98 first edition was a supported system. Since then, I've watched Windows as it progressed. For every advance and good feature it gained, the user lost control over another. XP was regarded by many as spyware. At least on XP, much of its spyware abilities can be removed or disabled. Now that's becoming impossible.

 

Could you please point me to evidence about Microsoft products being backdoored? I've read a lot about allegations but didn't find concrete evidence (FW/IDS logs, intercepted network traffic...) about it.

 

http://www.welivesecurity.com/2014/07/28/microsoft-backdoor/

 

The Microsfot executive in the original article was answering a question about 'products like Skype'.
He claim the company never been ask to change their code for to make it easier for government to compromise user privacy.

The software engineer Peter Biddle in Mashable interview was talking about Bitlocker specifically.

 

I don't believe there's any obvious backdoors when viewing the source cause otherwise if someone leaked said source it'd be found out easy (or if they were taken advantage of on a mass scale someone would have evidence by now). They don't even have to pursue backdoors when exploits are all over the place and can get the job done.

It's the level of trust people are putting into them that I'm against. Cause there's no child like idea of "oh, these people are bad" or "oh, they're good guys"- you'll always have people with an agenda of what they want done to benefit themselves, and they give into the temptation of doing so.

 

Its wise not to believe everything you hear including from me. Your question is fair enough. Unfortunately to really do this justice and expound on what I feel is good evidence entails going well beyond what we are allowed to post at wilders. Even if I were to, it wouldn't necessarily count as evidence in some peoples thinking. For whatever reason, two people given the same info will come to opposing decisons.

I'll say this though, evidence can be obtained by joining many dots as it were and that is the case with how I feel about M$. Of course we would all like it to be clear cut with something so irrefutable that even the hardest skeptic couldn't deny it. Very rarely do things play out like that. More often than not hard evidence is arrived at through varied and many means. I think Veeshush is right in that they aren't exactly going to make it obvious.

 

After the NSA supposedly helps MS "secure" Windows, we get an OS on which it's no longer possible to close open ports. This gets whitewashed by statements like "Those ports are only open to the local network". When the routers that protect those ports from internet access are being backdoored, that justification no longer holds up. The only pieces missing are the correct commands to exploit those open ports.

 

I was thinking about that too. Most software get exploited even if no intentional backdoors are open. If agency finds a backdoor vulnerability it probably won't disclose it until it can use it for their purpose. Who knows if anybody knew about OpenSSL bug before public disclosure or how they used that knowleadge.

 

In Bitlocker?

They do not find exploits immediately. It takes time.
When new product in development, better to know the weaknesses direct from mouth of the developer.

 

Not with Bitlocker but their other software as a whole.

With any hard drive encryption, I stand by the old "they'll just break your kneecaps and have you decrypt" idea (less you're storing information where it couldn't be found or you don't actually know the key). And I don't think public cases would let them resort to bring out the big guns to decrypt a drive that was encrypted even with Bitlocker. You better believe though that, say, if a hard drive from some sort of government adversary or foreign spy was encrypted by Bitlocker that it'd be decrypted by lunch time. Backdoor or not. I've always felt that Bitlocker is only decent for keeping your drive safe if your machine was stolen by local break and enter thieves. But I doubt Microsoft themselves would rely on it.

I actually truly believe they didn't know about the OpenSSL bug. Having agencies with a ton of money doesn't make them super humans. But I believe they've no doubt found some on their own, buy new ones from various third parties and, most frighteningly, know all previous exploits which are public knowledge.

They're not going to nuke a fly. Even year old publicly known exploits are probably more than enough for any civilian target- which is what journalist and whistle blowers mostly are.

 

Sad , very sad response, it was all over the news within a few weeks after they purchased Skype, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security.
Would there be any person in the world that still believes this exec ?
http://www.wpcentral.com/skype-raises-eyebrows-over-security-and-wire-tapping
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...le-to-police/2012/07/25/gJQAobI39W_story.html (2012!!) etc. etc.
Many people ended their Skype account the day Microsoft became the new owner.

 

Has there been any real 100% proof MS has backdoors?

Apart from the skype recent talk of course...

You would imagine all it would take it one person to leak or mention or discover any backdoors but it feels like its just been speculation and rumour ?

 

Does anyone have any recommendations of a privacy and secure based open source os ?