Microsoft has said it would fight “tooth and nail in the courts” to avoid adding backdoors to its products.
According to a panel debate, Scott Charney, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, confirm that the company had never been asked by the US Government to backdoor its products and would never willingly do it.
He said: “Under the wiretapping statute in FISA, you can be compelled to provide technical assistance. But if they said, for example, put in a backdoor or something like that, we would fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.
“If the Government did that – and I really don’t think they would – it would be at the complete expense of American competitiveness. If we put in a backdoor for the US Government we couldn’t sell anywhere in the world, not even in America.”
Writing for We Live Security, security analyst Graham Cluley said that last month, on the anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first revelations about NSA snooping, Microsoft called for the US Government to reform the NSA by ending the bulk collection of telephone record data, committing not to hack data centres and to increase transparency.
He said: “Whether Microsoft is doing this because it genuinely believes this is the right thing to do, or because it realises it faces huge commercial hurdles if it is perceived to be in the pocket of the NSA, doesn’t really matter. I suspect it’s a bit of both. I’m just pleased that they seem to be sticking up for us.”
Tim Erlin, director of security and risk at Tripwire, said: “If Microsoft has been asked to enable access for surveillance, it’s unlikely that Charney would provide an entirely truthful answer in this context.
“The reality of Government surveillance is not as simple as secret backdoors. If a very large Microsoft customer requested a feature to enable more effective security in their environment, and made that request contingent on a large purchase, would Microsoft say no? If that feature were also useful for capturing data in other contexts, would that be a backdoor?
“The recent research published around Apple’s iOS diagnostic capabilities sits in a similarly blurry position. Unfortunately, with the topic of Government surveillance we’re often left with questions and wild conspiracies rather than facts. Two years ago the idea that the NSA had compromised encryption standards seemed far-fetched.”
