14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not exactly a surprise Microsoft is once more denying any connection to the NSA surveillance programs, but documents leaked by Edward Snowden indicate something entirely different.
In a new piece published in The Guardian, it is revealed Microsoft has been aiding the NSA, FBI and CIA with data.
Apparently, Microsoft helped the NSA circumvent the encryptions they had set in place, which then allowed the intelligence agency to gain access to web chats on Outlook.com, since they already had access to emails sent through the service.
Most recently, NSA’s PRISM program gained access to the company’s SkyDrive cloud storage service, which has about 250 million users in the entire world.
Skype users aren’t safe either, as the NSA is collecting all phone calls though this service as well.
When PRISM was first revealed, Microsoft was named as the first company to have joined the program, in November 2007. Skype had already joined the program in June 2011, before Microsoft even bought the service.
Following the new article in The Guardian, Microsoft sent out yet another statement in which they deny all and any involvement with such programs. They say no governments are provided with blanket or direct access to any Microsoft products including the aforementioned ones.
However, under these circumstances, who will even believe them anymore?
All tech companies that were singled out when news about PRISM was published have denied involvement and have been trying to fix their broken brand-images with very little success.
This is particularly due to the silence coming from the White House when such subjects are published. The US officials and NSA leaders have not addressed the issue of which companies they were working with when they admitted to the programs and only said things weren’t really as bad as they looked.
However, new documents appear every few days and the scale of the US-run projects is unveiled, causing diplomatic problems for the country’s government.