Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur and has been a founder or participant in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978. This article originally appeared on his blog.

In Russia, President Putin’s office just 

Perhaps it’s 

For those of you who haven’t kept up, the National Security Agency (NSA’s) 

Prism is just a part of the NSA’s larger 

All hell broke loose when 

Given my talks on 

But while the interviewer focused on the Skype revelation, I thought the most interesting part was the other claim, “that the National Security Agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.”

Say what? They can see the plaintext on my computer before I encrypt it? That defeats any and all encryption methods. How could they do that?

Bypass encryption

While most outside observers think the NSA’s job is cracking encrypted messages, as the Prism disclosures have shown, the actual mission is simply to read all communications. Cracking codes is a last resort.

The NSA has a history of figuring out how to get to messages before or after they are encrypted. Whether it was by putting 

Today every desktop and laptop computer has another way for the NSA to get inside.

Intel Inside

It’s inevitable that complex microprocessors have bugs in them when they ship. When the first microprocessors shipped the only thing you could hope is that the bug didn’t crash your computer. The only way the chip vendor could fix the problem was to physically revise the chip and put out a new version. But computer manufacturers and users were stuck if you had an old chip.

After a particularly 

Starting in 1996 with the Intel P6 (Pentium Pro) to today’s P7 chips (Core i7) these processors contain instructions that are reprogrammable in what is called microcode. Intel can fix bugs on the chips by reprogramming a microprocessors microcode with a patch. This patch, called a microcode update, can be loaded into a processor by using special CPU instructions reserved for this purpose. These updates are not permanent, which means each time you turn the computer on, its microprocessor is reset to its built-in microcode, and the update needs to be applied again (through a computer’s 

Since 2000, Intel has put out 29 

Unfortunately, the microcode update format is undocumented and the code is 

The dog that never barked

The NSA has been incredibly 

Or perhaps the NSA, working with Intel and/or Microsoft, have wittingly have put backdoors in the microcode updates. A 

But what if you could use the 

Rather than risk getting caught messing with everyone’s updates, my bet is that the NSA has 

That means you don’t need backdoors baked in the hardware, don’t need Intel’s buy-in, don’t have discoverable rootkits, and you can target specific systems without impacting the public at large.

Two can play the game

A few months ago these kind of discussions haven’t implemented a microcode backdoor.

The downside is that 1) backdoors can be hijacked by others with even worse intent (so if the NSA has a microcode backdoor, the question is, who else is using it?) and 2) What other pieces of our infrastructure, such as routers, smartphones, military computers, and satellites, also use processors with uploadable microcode?

And that may be why the Russian president is now using a typewriter rather than a personal computer.