[iwar] Historical posting
From: Fred Cohen
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Mon, Jan 1, 1999
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Date: Mon, Jan 1, 1999
From: Fred Cohen
Reply-To: iwar@egroups.com
Subject: [iwar] Historical posting
At 08:25 AM 02/21/2000 -0600, Leo, Ross wrote:
>From: "Leo, Ross" Ross.Leo@c...
>
>I find this story amusing in terms of its irony and its blatant lunacy.
OK. I tend to agree, but for another reason. In defense, I must say
that the usefulness of such (hypothetical) collusion would not be to
"read all traffic everywhere all the time", but to have a backdoor that
could be employed in the event that other, independent evidence led one
to suspect a given set of machines to be of "topical interest".
That said, and while the "Pentagon/DoD/US Federal" may be the biggest
SINGLE client for MS, it would still represent only a small fraction
of their total market. The idea that they would risk the possible
impact to the larger market from even a chance of a reverse-engineered
evidence revealing the "hidden backdoor" is beyond my comprehension.
___tony___
>The Pentagon/DoD/US Federal Government probably is/are the biggest client(s)
>MS has, but not because they are in collusion on spy matters.
>As for the French complaining about this sort of thing, I think they have no
>room to talk on the matter of spying or eavesdropping on
>communications. They spend quite a bit of time and money doing this
>themselves, especially here in the US.
>
>It is ludicrous to think that the NSA forced IBM to accept Gates & Co.; to
>work with IBM as a plant by the NSA to work up a world-wide spy
>scheme as the report seems to claim. Such a plan (!!!) could not have been
>this successful by intention. Only chance and timing could
>really have made such a thing possible. Besides, the NSA and the USFG fail
>at schemes much smaller than this with frightening
>regularity. To posit that such a sweeping take-over of nearly all the
>desktop computers in the world could be engineered by a government
>agency, ANY government agency, seems to come more from the likes of a
>Hollywood science-fiction B movie screenplay than from any
>credible reporting source, let alone the French. Besides, even the much
>vaunted NSA has nothing like the computing horsepower or the
>manpower to deal the flood (of biblical proportions) that such traffic
>monitoring would produce.
>
>I have heard this one before, and then it seemed to stem from the
>observation that Windows et al consumed resources that could not be 100%
>accounted for (by assignment to programs and processes that were then
>running). The answer is simple: MS writes very resource-inefficient
>software, sometimes called "bloat-ware". They are not alone in this.
>
>This story stretches the "conspiracy theory" theory a little too far for me,
>and sounds more like "dis-information" than information.
>
>Ross A. Leo
>
>Ross A. Leo, CISSP, CBCP
>Director, Information Assurance & Security
>CSOC Houston
>Voice: 281.853.3516
>Fax: 281.853.3140
>
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Tony Bartoletti 925-422-3881 azb@l...
Information Operations, Warfare and Assurance Center
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA 94551-9900