A French intelligence report alleges that Microsoft was
set up with NSA funding and that NSA imposed MS-DOS
on IBM, and also alleges that NSA agents are now working
at Microsoft:
http://cryptome.org/nsa-ms-spy.htm
The full confidential report has not been published and these
allegations are made by an intelligence newsletter which
claims to have seen it. The Age, an Australian newspaper,
has reported on the topic today -- that account leads the file
above.
The NSA MS key revelation appears in the reports, and may
have prompted the intelligence investigation and speculation,
along with the April 1999 report for Europarl, due to be considered
by EuroParl in a week, which also warns of Microsoft's and Intel's
possible cooperation with US intelligence to use Winte as a spying
tool.
Still, we had not before seen an allegation that NSA was in on
the gitgo with Microsoft and that DOS had been forced upon
IBM. Is that old news or new, or merely a French counterattack
on Echelon-like espionage?