Cooperation between NSA and Microsoft raises questions

4 Dec, 2009 02:22 / Updated 14 years ago

The US National Security Agency has offered to work with Microsoft on the development of their Windows software. It comes amid claims that the NSA could track users and intercept their communications.

RT contributor and investigative journalist Wayne Madsen says the main question for NSA and Microsoft now is to explain how they define defensive and offensive information security.

NSA now has three missions,” Madsen said. “They’ve always had a mission of basically spying on foreign communications. They also had a job of protecting US message traffic and secrets by creating our own cryptographic system. And now it’s the role of cyber security. The question is what constitutes protective information security or what they call defensive information warfare operations. What’s the difference between that and offensive information?”