Software giant Microsoft has denied that its wonderful new Windows 7 has a back door to let US government agents into any PC running the operating system. There were a few worries about a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official told before Congress that the agency had worked on the operating system.

Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's information assurance director, told the Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security that the agency had partnered with the developer during the creation of Windows 7 "to enhance Microsoft's operating system security guide."

The statement worried Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronics Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who felt that Redmond was crazy to let the spooks near the software as they would almost certainly want to stuff something into it to spy on people.

Rotenberg called it an "obvious concern," and added that it might be difficult for major software makers to turn down NSA "suggestions" to provide it with backdoors because the US federal government is an important customer.

However yesterday Microsoft went out of its way to categorically deny that it had made any backdoor in its software. The spooks were only working with Redmond on the outfit's Security Compliance Management Toolkit.

The toolkit provides a set of security configurations to provide Windows 7 with the ability to tackle higher than normal levels of security risks.