MSFT is giving cops free USB drives designed to autocollect personal info from PCs

A) Another reason I'm glad I'm a non-Windows user (rather than specify my OS of choice, in this case it seems sufficient to just be 'other').

B) I would imagine these devices are going to be pretty easy to detect. They have to be auto-mounted and execute some iteration of the MS auto-run thing (foggy on details here as I don't do much of anything with Windows). I imagine that you could make some good money with an underground app that (choose one or more of the following):

   - Detected the USB drive and just erased everything on it
 
   - Detect the USB drive and delete/obliterate data in a given folder on the PC

   -  Detect the USB drive and fill it with benign (and incorrect) data

I think about this, and unless support for these devices were baked into the kernel of Windows (which may well happen in the not too distant future), they seem easy to circumvent.

wow, more reasons NOT to use microsoft products