If you’re running Windows, always assume that if the US Authorities or Microsoft itself want to spy on you as an individual or on do a little industrial espionage on your company (which US agencies also do), they’ll just use a backdoor already present or at worse push an update to your machines(s) to create said backdoor.
Treat any and all software made by US companies as a foreign agent.
All the shit that the US Government and companies say about China, is pure Projection - the result of a mental process of “what would we do if we were the ones making those devices”.
(And, yeah, China probably does that shit too)
If it ain’t Open Source, you got it as a binary or it can self-update, that software is somebody else’s agent and you’re trusting their ethics and goodwill when you have it running in your system outside a sandbox.
What’s unfortunate is a significant number of people don’t like hearing this and instead choose to project onto other countries. Most of our governments aren’t our friends, regardless if you’re American or not.
Any company based in or with operations in American can receive a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, aka FISA Court) order to allow mass access to data in systems they control (which definitelly includes networked machines running Windows for Microsoft ever since Microsoft has been able to push software to them - in the form of updates - to do anything they want in that machine).
These orders cannot be legally divulged by the recipient and can only be disputed in FISA Courts, the proceedings of which are themselves not public and cannot be divulged unless the side fighting the Authorities wins.
In other words, companies based in or with operations in the US can receive secret orders from an American Foreign Surveillance court which they must comply with without divulging them and which they cannot dispute elsewhere but that court, which has many special rules making it different from a normal Court, with for example the proceedings being secret.
The Surveillance System in the US is far more powerful, systematic and well entrenched than that idea you have that “companies do favors for the Feds” - that shit hasn’t been true since at least the Patriot Act.
If you’re running Windows, always assume that if the US Authorities or Microsoft itself want to spy on you as an individual or on do a little industrial espionage on your company (which US agencies also do), they’ll just use a backdoor already present or at worse push an update to your machines(s) to create said backdoor.
Treat any and all software made by US companies as a foreign agent.
All the shit that the US Government and companies say about China, is pure Projection - the result of a mental process of “what would we do if we were the ones making those devices”. (And, yeah, China probably does that shit too)
If it ain’t Open Source, you got it as a binary or it can self-update, that software is somebody else’s agent and you’re trusting their ethics and goodwill when you have it running in your system outside a sandbox.
What’s unfortunate is a significant number of people don’t like hearing this and instead choose to project onto other countries. Most of our governments aren’t our friends, regardless if you’re American or not.
Most likely, it’s Microsoft doing it, and if the Feds ask them nicely, they’ll happily share the intel.
Any company based in or with operations in American can receive a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, aka FISA Court) order to allow mass access to data in systems they control (which definitelly includes networked machines running Windows for Microsoft ever since Microsoft has been able to push software to them - in the form of updates - to do anything they want in that machine).
These orders cannot be legally divulged by the recipient and can only be disputed in FISA Courts, the proceedings of which are themselves not public and cannot be divulged unless the side fighting the Authorities wins.
In other words, companies based in or with operations in the US can receive secret orders from an American Foreign Surveillance court which they must comply with without divulging them and which they cannot dispute elsewhere but that court, which has many special rules making it different from a normal Court, with for example the proceedings being secret.
The Surveillance System in the US is far more powerful, systematic and well entrenched than that idea you have that “companies do favors for the Feds” - that shit hasn’t been true since at least the Patriot Act.