the NSA in your ASS

this is fairly old news (1999), but new to me and most likely you.
however:

The National Security Agency (NSA), the official codebreakers / digital information gatherers / cryptography department of the United States, might have had access to any Microsoft Windows computer since Windows95.

yea, that's right:
see, there are high-encryption keys in your computer. i would think of these as wicked-good passwords, big-ass passwords that you unlock data with. these basically allow Windows to encrypt information, to an extent. in reality, there is a federal limit on encryption that can be used in or exported by the United States. what that means is that if you encrypt some information, a file, a message, whatever, you can only make it as unbreakable as the NSA said you can.

anywayz...

what i didn't know is that in Microsoft Windows, there is a key that microsoft put in, as well as one that is for use by the NSA. supposedly, these keys could allow the NSA, or maybe even microsoft, to gain full control of your computer.

not that it matters, and as if you care.

source: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5263/1.html