Microsoft helped the NSA bypass encryption, new Snowden leak reveals

Re:Microsoft helped the NSA bypass encryption, new Snowden l... by hypercube on Friday July 12, 2013 @10:15AM (#6032664)

Why does the NSA have full access to your servers? Even if they manually wiretap your server it would require manual intervention, and is thus a good protection against blanket surveillance.

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Re:Microsoft helped the NSA bypass encryption, new Snowden l... by a3n on Friday July 12, 2013 @10:29AM (#6032752)

"Why does the NSA have full access to your servers?"

Because they ordered him to give it, and he elected not to go to jail.

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Re:Microsoft helped the NSA bypass encryption, new Snowden l... by TsiCClawOfLight on Friday July 12, 2013 @10:52AM (#6032897)

He means "how". Open-source protects against software backdoors (though obviously not against key-sharing et alii)

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Re:Microsoft helped the NSA bypass encryption, new Snowden l... by throwit1979 on Friday July 12, 2013 @11:08AM (#6032964)

What? Open source in a cloud service stack means that if the NSA thugs show up and order you to insert intercepts into your software on pain of being "disappeared", it's far EASIER to change the source and recompile than it is with proprietary software.

rimantas is referring to using open source in a cloud service, not authoring and distributing it.

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Re:Microsoft helped the NSA bypass encryption, new Snowden l... by flyinRyan on Friday July 12, 2013 @02:17PM (#6034134)

What are you talking about? Open-source doesn't protect against backdoors even theoretically. Think about it. Have you read every line of every piece of software you run? Would you understand it all if you did? Even if you read the source code, did you actually compile it all from scratch or did you use a binary (like virtually every single OSS user on earth)? Are you certain that the compiler you used wasn't compromised? How exactly?

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