As recently reported in The Washington Post, Microsoft sought help from the NSA in making sure Windows Vista is Secure. This isn’t so surprising, in fact the article mentions that Apple and Novell have done the same for their operating systems.

So what did the NSA do for Microsoft? It appears they formed a ‘red team’ to try and ‘attack’ Vista to find it’s vulnerabilities, and a ‘blue team’ to try and configure Vista to be more secure. Were these the only teams involved though? The red and blue teams were working towards the NSA’s secondary objective, which is “information assurance”. What’s their primary objective? Monitoring the communications of foreign powers, terrorists, and others. With Windows owning over 90% of desktop computing, and desktop computers being a major means of communication, could there not be a ‘gold team’ working on secure ways to monitor communications done with Windows Vista?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not wearing a tin foil hat screaming the government and Microsoft are spying on us. It does seems a legitimate question though. As a US citizen, would I be safer if my government had a way of monitoring communications done via PC’s? Some might say that the Constitution wouldn’t allow this, but of course we’ve seen in the past couple years, through wire-tapping, the Patriot Act, etc that legalities don’t matter when it comes to terrorism.

So, what are your views on this issue? Would you feel safer knowing we did have a way of eavesdropping on the bad guys? Would it stop you from using Vista if you knew there was a back door of this kind? Is it even possible/practical to do in the first place? Leave your comments below!