Cablegate: Microsoft spied for USA | Hacker News Reader

Cablegate: Microsoft spied for USA

cablegatesearch.net

9 pointspitiburi6 comments

The cable says " Microsoft's General Manager, Gonzalo Fernandez (protect), showed EconOff an internal PDVSA memo which claimed that all U.S. software companies had a "back door" mechanism whereby the U.S. government could at any time access information, citing the supposed CALEA Law (United States Law of Assistance in Communications for Security Systems)." This seems fishy to me

Many different things on that are fishy... The claims that the Microsoft GM did are at the very best, completely inexact.... But the thing is, Microsoft got access to internal documents of one of the biggest foreign companies in the world, and went to the USA embassy with that information. Scary -and illegal-.

What is illegal about it? That's wasn't made clear in the memo.

Those internal documents are property of PDVSA; it even say so in each of those internal documents, that the information is confidential and property of PDVSA. Microsoft is not legally allowed to get the memos -which is not clear if they did through backdoors in the software or just with spies inside the company-. And of course, is not allowed to pass/use that information.

> Those internal documents are property of PDVSA; it even say so in each of those internal documents, that the information is confidential and property of PDVSA

I have no idea about Venezuelan law, but in the U.S., that's more of a statement of intent than a legally dispositive statement. Try this google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=this+document+is+confidential...

Am I breaking the law by reading those?

A search for "internal PDVSA memo" shows that journalists inside and outside Venezuela have published information from them before, so maybe the law is not so different there.

> which is not clear if they did through backdoors in the software or just with spies inside the company

Well, probably somebody emailed it to him with a comment like "Is there any truth to this?" or "Any comment?" or "You might be interested in this." I suppose you could call them "spies", but I doubt they got compensated for it!

"According to Microsoft, no government in the world has successfully used Linux for large operations (Brazil and Cuba reportedly attempted this, but then abandoned the effort)."

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