There is a posting on Slashdot today entitled “Microsoft Helps Police Crack Your Computer” (http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/29/1441215.shtml). To summarize, Microsoft is distributing a thumb drive device with specialty forensics tools to select law enforcement officials. Apparently this is a beta test of the new tools to see how well they are accepted (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2004379751_msftlaw29.html).

The knee jerk reaction to this is that Microsoft has done it again but I don’t believe they are to blame. I am sure law enforcement initiated this course of action and Microsoft is only keeping one of their biggest customers happy. You can’t blame Microsoft because they only made the process easier. The tools to do all of this is already on the market, Microsoft has only shrink wrapped them and put a pretty bow on top. Of course there should be ways to forensically investigate computer systems but hearing things like this always makes be uneasy considering many of the privacy problems of the recent past. This is another reason to go over to www.truecrypt.org and download the latest version of their free whole disk encryption package.

I am sorry but I seem to be a bit confused as to why this is a bad thing. Is it bad thing that MS may provide a tool that helps law enforcement agencies to convict sexual predators, drug traffickers, child pornographers, internet thieves or a myriad of other criminals?



Why is there someone to blame? Maybe blame criminals. Your post makes it seems as if MS is doing a bad thing by assisting law enforcement officials or that law enforcement shouldn't collect evidence of crimes.

What privacy concern? If there is an officer (at least in the US) be it federal or otherwise at your PC it is because they have a search warrant gained via submitting probable cause. I know several officers who investigate computer crimes. You will have to take my word for it that they do not care if someone is surfing pornography or what have you. They are concerned about things like people soliciting sex from minors, e-mailing bomb and/or death threats to their school, and there are other examples I can think of.

One of the great things mentioned in the article is that the help from MS helps reduce the time it takes to collect electronic evidence. This only saves the tax payers money. Additionally, the program from MS is aimed to help locations both nationally and internationally that are less likely to have staff available to gather electronic evidence from PCs.

Personally, I applaud Ms for this one.