this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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It’s not a security flaw, it’s by design. Microsoft has been building this surveillance apparatus for years, and the purchase of government access to your computer and data using your tax dollars is a lucrative alignment of state and corporate power. Their recent design choices point to a rabid desperation to turn your PC into an Apple-style walled-garden.
It goes like this:
Require online Microsoft account creation.
Require TPM compliance to run Windows.
Forcibly encrypt the user’s data under the guise of “security”, even without permission or even user action. (Encryption is good! Right?)
Link your identity, payment information, data, online activity, and encryption keys to your hardware ID.
Record everything you do and use that data to train an AI model with onboard tensor hardware.
Exfiltrate the entire model, or just query it remotely for “online services.” Or, in this case, just have MS give you the fucking recovery keys. lol
All done “securely” with tamper resistance and mathematical verifiability that whatever is on your device is yours, and that you took that action with limited plausible deniability.
If you think you’ve got nothing to hide, think again about the current activities of ICE, law enforcement investigations based on reproductive health data, the pornography suppression movement, age verification, and the data harvesting of dissenting speech. What’s legal today can quickly become “illegal” tomorrow. The constitution is just a piece of paper in a fancy climate controlled box.
If they were that interested, why would they push encryption at all?
That’s a great question, and it is because it enables a chain of cryptographic controls that enable verification, tamper resistance, and secrecy while selling Bitlocker as computer security. It is technically secure, except that MS has your recovery keys and can just give them to whoever they want, like the FBI!
This way, they can mathematically verify:
Who you are and the exact unique machine you use (verification from a unique machine ID associated with your encryption keys and Windows account data)
Know that the data has not been altered in transit (tamper resistant hashing of your data)
No one else knows except them (secret encryption keys stored in hardware that only Microsoft controls, not you, Microsoft)
This architecture also keeps their data on your machine secure. If someone maintains an encrypted archive on your hard drive that only they control the keys to, say like a movie or a video game, who owns that data really? If it’s decrypted only for authorized use, you’re really only renting that content from the owner. This is called Digital Rights Management, and it’s much easier when this security chain is in place.
Technically they could do this remotely if they really wanted to and your machine were powered. Imagine what you could do with this power for every Windows machine on the planet.
There is also the case when a computer is lost or stolen. With bitlocker on, the content of the computer cannot be accesses without the key, which the new owner will not have.
I always thought that was the main point of using bitlocker.