14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft was one of the first tech companies to deny involvement in spying programs secretly launched by the NSA and the US government and carried by Yahoo, according to recent revelations.
The Redmond-based tech giant has provided a very short statement to explain that the firm has never been involved in spying programs like the ones that Yahoo might have been part of, but the company refused to provide any other details on this.
“We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo,” it said.
Without knowing any other details, it would be interesting to find out whether Microsoft itself was approached by the NSA or the US government for such spying programs, but we’ll probably learn more about this in the coming weeks and months.
For what it’s worth, Google has already confirmed that it never received such requests from the US government, while Twitter not only said it wasn’t contacted for spying on its users but added that “were we to receive it we’d challenge it in a court.”
Microsoft’s fight against the US government
Microsoft, on the other hand, has always opposed privacy violations in the United States and the company has a lawsuit against a government order that would block firms from telling users that their data is being requested by law enforcement agencies.
The Redmond giant has already received the support of several large tech companies in the US who filed amicus briefs, including Google, Facebook, and Apple.
“There’s this very uniform view among all these people that affirm both the breadth of the government practice that we have experienced, and are attesting to the sense that we need a new balance. And that’s what I hope this case can bring; inject some new balance where it feels like we’ve lost that balance in recent years,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s chief legal officer, recently said in an interview.
The lawsuit is still in its early days, but Microsoft isn’t willing to give up on it and the company is actually very optimistic about the judge ruling in its favor. The first briefing has only recently been completed before the First District Court in Washington.