Despite how the authors seem to WANT to interpret/misconstrue this, to me it's very obvious that there's no such "ban". What's going on here is that MS thinks its tech is bound to produce bad results "in the wild", so they're simply avoiding liability, i.e., covering their asses.

Work to develop "sufficiently" reliable tech that can be used to deploy China-like mass surveillance is obviously happening and will obviously be gladly sold to every single fucking police department in the smallest most insignificant little hamlet all over the US.

Needless to say too, all this pertains to the tech that is known and publicly available to the least hidden and dark corners of the State Apparatus.I don't think anyone is stupid or naif enough to think that the worst actors like the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the branches of the military... do not already have and use much more advanced tech, develop jointly with Microsoft itself and others.