Microsoft Windows

NSA has done somethuing similar with computers. In September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA HAD ARRANGED WITH Microsoft to inser special “keys” into Windows software. In all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientists, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonyum in North Carolina, has disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun- Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called “KEY” The other was called “NSKEY” Fernandez presented his finding at a conference ay which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without user's knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA 's “back door” in the world most commonly operateing system makes it “orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer.”

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According with the DAS report, “it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration. “ The report stated that there had been a strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft , and by the ptesence of NSA personnel in Bill Cates development teams” The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft biggest client in the world.

From the book “ROGUE STATE”, by William Blum