The National Security Agency’s snooping practices may be costing American companies a lot of money. German publication Zeit Online has obtained leaked documents that purportedly show that IT experts within the German government believe that Windows 8 contains back doors that the NSA could use to remotely control any computers that have it installed.
Wow.
To be a little bit more precise, they warn about the combination of Windows 8 and TPM 2.0 “trusted computing” (most Orwellian moniker in tech history) chips.
As current Apple computers do not have these chips, running WIndows 8 on a Mac would not be critical according to the German BSI (federal office for secure information technology). A PC running Windows 8 and having a TPM 2.0 component though would be considered uncontrollable by the owner / user. They further indicate that they are actively negotiating with TPM parties (Intel, MS, AMD etc.) to ensure that such systems could still be considered for use in government offices, after certain provisions are made (e.g. certain TPM 2.0 functionality can be disabled in EFI/BIOS).
I do not know in how far these adjustments can be made though, as certain licensing and copy protection schemes (e.g. Blu-ray) might conflict here.