Battleangel

Niels Ferguson, Microsoft developer and cryptographer claims that back doors into BitLocker-encrypted data will happen over his dead body. It seems reasonable that not even MS would compromise their software, which Ferguson notes will protect government secrets around the world as well as private data. Back doors would be very counterproductive and like they point out, there is still a keyfile or a password to be had.
One question that this raises, knowing how persistent some governments are, is whether all (eight?) versions of Vista will ship with BitLocker and whether the bit strength will be the same across the board? Kind of like when PGP and Netscape used to make a fuzz about the maximum bit strength when exporting software outside the U.S. As for what regulations are in effect today, and how they would apply to mass-distributed software like Vista, who knows …