New papers show that Microsoft discussed with the NSA on sharing user data

May 15, 2014 06:50 GMT  ·  By
Microsoft claims that it only provided access to accounts based on legal requests
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   Microsoft claims that it only provided access to accounts based on legal requests

Microsoft has until now denied every single claim of a possible collaboration with the NSA, but new documents published by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden on the PRISM revelations, indicate that the software giant at least discussed with the top US intelligence agency on a possible program that would include user data sharing.

These papers have been included in Greenwald's book “No Place to Hide” and published by TechCrunch, showing that Microsoft negotiated with the NSA and the FBI a plan that would support data collection from a number of services, including Outlook.com, SkyDrive (now renamed to OneDrive) and Skype.

While the leaked information clearly shows NSA's collaboration with Microsoft, it also includes a number of statements belonging to the software giant that say basically the same thing as before, indicating that the company only provided access to the account mentioned in government orders.

This means that Microsoft hasn't offered unlimited access to user accounts and it only tried to comply with federal requirements to share information on specific users.

Here's what Microsoft replied after the Outlook.com claims:

“First, while we did discuss legal compliance requirements with the government as reported last week, in none of these discussions did Microsoft provide or agree to provide any government with direct access to user content or the ability to break our encryption. Second, these discussions were instead about how Microsoft would meet its continuing obligation to comply with the law by providing specific information in response to lawful government orders.”

As far as OneDrive is concerned, Microsoft said basically the same thing and only explained that it complied with legal requests and no direct access has been provided to user accounts.

“In 2013 we made changes to our processes to be able to continue to comply with an increasing number of legal demands of governments worldwide. None of these changes provided any government with direct access to SkyDrive.”

In the case of Skype, Microsoft admitted that it made some modifications to the backend, but only to improve the reliability of the service, and not to help the government keep an eye on its users.

“The reporting last week made allegations about a specific change in 2012. We continue to enhance and evolve the Skype offerings and have made a number of improvements to the technical back-end for Skype, such as the 2012 move to in-house hosting of ‘supernodes’ and the migration of much Skype IM traffic to servers in our data centers. These changes were not made to facilitate greater government access to audio, video, messaging or other customer data.”

Here are the documents revealed by Greenwald and published by TechCrunch this morning:

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Microsoft claims that it only provided access to accounts based on legal requests
Leaked documents showing Microsoft's collaboration with the NSALeaked documents showing Microsoft's collaboration with the NSA
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