If you visit The Register and do a bit of a search, you'll find they've had a certain amount about this lately. As ever, the comments following the relevant articles are illuminating.
All a bit over my head but, for what it's worth:
Antivirus software needs to burrow really deeply into a computer, identifying not only iffy files but iffy behaviour. There can't be much going on that your antivirus doesn't know about.
Antiviruses tend to telephone home. This is with honest intent, I think - dodgy looking stuff can be checked into.
That means that "the cloud" is involved and, as ever, who knows what control we have over what goes into the cloud?
Probably a little embarrassing if (say) NSA spyware is detected as something suspect, the details are forwarded to the mothership and dissected by the antivirus's boffins. They now know just how the gummint spy programs whose behaviour betrayed those programs to the antivirus work.
If governments are nervous about a certain government (say, Russia), they might prefer not to have antivirus companies in that country's jurisdiction figuring out just what they (the governments) are up to, nor how they do it.
Given the need for security within intra-governmental communications, it would make sense for governments not to use an antivirus whose owners could be obliged to reveal anything sensitive which the antivirus software has unearthed.
For the rest of us, it's probably not a problem.
How governments cope with this, goodness knows. Are there, for instance, any UK-based antivirus vendors? Tricky. Even the built-in antivirus in modern Windows software is, after all, American - and who knows what it's observing and passing on, and to whom?
All great fun in a tin-hat sort of way, but as I said, I suspect it's of little consequence to most of us.
Just to be safe, I'll stick with a system that doesn't rely on antivirus (so far, touch wood...)
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