14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has asked the Attorney General of the United States to permit Microsoft and other companies to publicly share a more complete set of data about how national security requests are handled in regards to customer information.
The company claims that the government lawyers are yet to respond to the petition filed in court on June 19, in which they ask to publish the volume of national security requests received.
Once more, the company states that they have no connection to the NSA spying programs, regardless of the information made public so far.
For instance, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s Executive VP for Legal and Corporate Affairs, says that emails going through Outlook.com are safe and the company doesn’t provide direct access to emails or instant messages.
“Recent leaked government documents have focused on the addition of HTTPS encryption to Outlook.com instant messaging, which is designed to make this content more secure as it travels across the Internet,” Smith said.
“To be clear, we do not provide any government with the ability to break the encryption, nor do we provide the government with encryption keys,” he states.
Regarding the company’s cloud service, Microsoft once more states that the government is not getting direct access to the data, but that they comply with some of the requests made by the authorities.
Skype has been involved in the PRISM program since before Microsoft even bought the company, but now Microsoft says that none of the voice and video communications has been handed out to the various legal entities freely.
“Microsoft remains committed to responding only to valid legal demands for specific user account information. We will not provide governments with direct or unfettered access to customer data or encryption keys,” Smith said.
The same statements are made regarding the Enterprise Email and Document Storage services offered by the company.
In short, Microsoft is once more making a point in denying any ties to the spying programs run by the NSA, despite all the leaked documents straight from the intelligence agency’s servers and the fact that the authorities have yet to deny connections to any of the companies listed so far.