Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:

I’m surprised… surprised the U.S. didn’t say anything about this first, knowing our government. :-)

At any rate, because of the new built-in drive encryption features in Windows Vista, law enforcement officials may need a way around the encryption. Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University was testifying before the Commons home affairs select committee on a different matter when he spoke on this.

The system uses BitLocker Drive Encryption through a chip called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in the computer’s motherboard.

“This means that by default your hard disk is encrypted by using a key that you cannot physically get at… an unfortunate side effect from law enforcement is it would be technically fairly seriously difficult to dig encrypted material out of the system if it has been set up competently.”

[Read more about U.K. Back Doors Into Vista]

Tags: windows, vista, microsoft, privacy, encryption, realtechnews, michael santo, trusted platform module, tpm, law enforcement