A recent article by James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald, How US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security confirms non-open source software is dangerous to your privacy, business, military and government (if you are not the U.S.).
One brief quote from an article you need to digest in full:
Funding for the program – $254.9m for this year – dwarfs that of the Prism program, which operates at a cost of $20m a year, according to previous NSA documents. Since 2011, the total spending on Sigint enabling has topped $800m. The program “actively engages US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs”, the document states. None of the companies involved in such partnerships are named; these details are guarded by still higher levels of classification.
Among other things, the program is designed to “insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems”. These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as “adversaries”.
No names but it isn’t hard to guess whose software products has backdoors.
How to know if your system is vulnerable to the U.S. government?
Find the Gartner Report that includes your current office suite or other software.
Compare the names in the Gartner report to your non-open source software. Read’em and weep.
How to stop being vulnerable to the U.S. government?
A bit harder but doable.
Support the Apache Software Foundation and other open source software projects.
As Ginny Weasley finds in the Harry Potter series, it’s important to know where magical objects keep their brains.
Same is true for software. Just because you can’t see into it, doesn’t mean it can see you. It may be spying on you.
Open software is far less likely to spy on you. Why? Because the backdoor or security compromise would be visible to anyone. Including people who would blow the whistle.
OpenOffice or other open source software not meeting your needs?
For OpenDocument Format (ODF) (used by numerous open source software projects), post your needs: office-comment-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org (subscription link).
Support the open source project of your choice.
Or not, if you like being spied on by software you paid for.